Firestarter - The Rants of a Pyrophile

yaho~

haha. you cant really see how much i grew in those 20 years in this photo. but i'm a little bit taller than him now. i probably weigh more too. nyahaha. here are some more.


there are tonnes of other photos. it was well fun. we should definitely do it more often. but its kinda hard to get everyone together at one time. i almost didnt go to this trip. the plane was then ready and we were going to do the flight test that weekend.

but in the end, i'm glad i went. (^_^)

oh yeah, i also realised that i was tagged by aisha. that came as a bit of a surprise since i thought that the only readers i have are me and my big sister (who only reads it when i ask her to). sad, i know. ten random things huh? hmmm. thats a bit complicated since i'm about as random as a solid crystalline structure *shoots herself on the foot for being so lame*. i'll give it a try anyway, so here goes.

10 Random Things about Khairun 'Pyro' Baharuddin

1. I dont have OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) but when it comes to leaving the car after i've driven, i'd always have to keep checking and rechecking whether i've locked it. better safe than sorry eh?

2. i have an innate fear of butterflies (mottephobia)

3. i need my daily caffeine fix otherwise i'd get a real head hurt, or worse, i'd get really cranky

4. i love to sing out loud to whatever i'm listening to. even when i dont know the words. it drives other people up the wall but its great at getting rid of stress

5. i love citrusy smells

6. i get all goosebumpy when kamen rider does his signature move, and when naruto uses his rasengan/rasen-shuriken, and when any shinigami releases their bankai

7. if i get scared at night (which sometimes happens), it still makes me feel better to sleep with the light on

8. i cant sleep without my feet covered up by my duvet or blankie. not too sure why, but i bet it has something to do with people saying that toyols suck your blood out from your big toe

9. i'm slightly IT-challenged

10. whenever i'm tired, i tend to say things wrongly, like mixing up the consonants and vowels in a word. been happening a lot lately

fuh~ i made it. that took ages. anyhow, here's the part thats even harder. i have to tag other people too. meh. most of the blogs i read have already been tagged. lets see then. the chosen ones are

una
faiz
nad
jimin
lutfi

there you go. i know some of you might have been tagged before, but wheres the harm in putting a few more details eh? so, no pressure. do it if and when you have the time k?

did you see the video? did you? did you??? that, ladies and gentlemen, was the freewing rc plane scratch built by your resident fire lover and her partner ida. it actually flew (not that i was surprised of course). here are the (approximated) project stats ...

243 hours of thinking
16 hours of cutting & sawing
24 hours of sanding & filing
15 hours of gluing
43.8 hours of being confused
19 hours of making mistakes
3 hours of being lost in ara damansara
12 hours in the car
198 hours in the lab
3.5 hours of being laughed at by the RC community
2 minutes of flight attempts
27 seconds of successful flight

like i said before, these are all approximated figures, which roughly means its completely inaccurate and unreliable. but all those things did happen, which is to say, yep, we did all the thinking, and we did the gluing, and we did get lost and, and, sure as heck, we got confused a lot too. and i mean A LOT. the whole free wing thing is rather new, even by modern aviation standards. and there arent a lot of literature on it so it was pretty much a 'figure-it-out-as-we-go-along' process. the situation got so bad that we were confused by units even when we had a calculator and unit converter. i mean, why would you divide units into sixteenths anyway? divide them into tenths like normal people.

but then again, the 27 seconds of flight was worth every second of being tired, stressed out and, generally, being in total agony over this project. now i know maybe a millionth of what it felt like when the Wright Bros managed to get Kitty Hawk up in the air. kudos to the pilot, mr wan though, who managed to fly the thingamagigy. he knew zilch about the free wing but put in so much effort to help us anyway. he's awesome. and you shouldve seen him land our plane. it was a belly landing (since our landing gear got torn off in the first flight attempt). not a scratch on the plane. it just sort of floated softly to the ground.

all in all its been crap load of craziness. the past few weeks especially had been so tiring but worthwhile. and now, i can go back to being a normal person and not someone who wakes up early, goes to bed late, and spends two thirds of the day in a lab/workshop building with no regard as to how i look.

i can see it!! the light!!! i can see the light!!!

but then again, i have really good eyesight. so even when the light at the end of the tunnel is miles away, i'd still be able to see it. call it optimism.

seriously though, we're so close now. after god knows how long of being frustrated/annoyed/depressed/demoralised (delete where appropriate), i reckon we're almost there. but i think i'll stop talking about it for now. dont wanna jinx it. fingers crossed everyone!!!

went to get some stuff for the project on sunday (or was it monday? tuesday? sometime this week anyway) and as always, i got a bit distracted (being distracted comes oh so easily). spent ages browsing through the limited albeit cheap books at this bookstore in amcorp mall and finally...



jya~n. its the 33rd book in the discworld series and, as expected, its absolutely hilarious. i lo~ve terry pratchett's discworld. i'm still laughing from the last discworld book that i read (small gods). its awesome times infinity squared!! lighthearted and smart. like this from Going Postal on page 35.

" 'Apprentice Postman Stanley,' mumbled Groat. 'Orphan, sir. Very sad. Came to us from the Siblings of Offler charity home, sir. Both parents passed away of the Gnats on their farm out in the wilds, sir, and he was raised by peas.'
'Surely you mean on peas, Mr Groat?'
'By peas, sir. Very unusual case. A good lad if he doesn't get upset but he tends to twist towards the sun, sir, if you get my meaning.' "

Hahahaha. That's hilarious. anyone who tells me otherwise has no sense of humour and should go find some. you should read the part about the number pi. there's always some theories and stuff and sometimes it all makes complete sense.

there was this one bookstore that i went to where they put terry pratchett under the children section. thats a bit unfair i think coz adults wont go near the children section so they wont ever get to know how awesome a writer he is. i'm slowly collecting all the discworld series. and i mean verry slowly. slower than a glacier. which is a bit of a shame and is exactly why i should get off of my bum and start looking for a job.

enough fangirling. the weirdest thing happened just now. i was texting faiz and then suddenly my fingers went faster than my brain. i'd only just worked out what i wanted to write but when i looked at the screen i realised i'd already written it. that cant be right can it? fingers thinking for themselves and making their own decision. its like a decentralized organizational structure (rare chance of applying my organizational behaviour knowledge). next thing i know they'll be painting their nails pink and signing up for marathons without me knowing.

right then. i'm off. have to wake up early tomorrow to get some stuff for the project. somehow or other we'd always end up realizing that we need something important a day after out trip to Ara Damansara and/or SS2. call it poor planning? yep, that sounds about right. but in my defense, we're only just learning.

well, for most people anyway. for me and ida, it was back to the lab once the poster exhibition is over. the day was tiring enough as it is, what with the standing and sitting around. but once we got to the lab, it was a whole new kind of tired. we'd left this carbon epoxy composite to cure overnight and somehow it got stuck on the table. and now we kinda have to do the damn wing all over again. that makes the score = Wing - 3, IdaKiren - 0.

i know murphy's law applies to each and everyone of us but i'm starting to think that it applies itself a little too well to our final year project. there was that wing thing. and then the other day it was the glue thing. nope, i didnt get my hand stuck on the table top with industrial glue although that option seems rather more enjoyable compared to having to do the wing again. i went and bought this glue after carefully reading the label which clearly says its foam safe. so what happened after i put the glue on the foam? it completely dissolved like a whole section of my wing of course. hah! i bet you didnt know that foam dissolves did you? and by foam i mean polystyrene foam, not shower foam because why on earth would you put glue on that kinda foam?

so back to the poster exhibition. the dude who was paid to evaluate us was from DCA (department of civil aviation). nothing went past him. you should've seen his face. he didnt just look at you. he was looking at your brain. like how your brain is functioning and your thought process. i was planning to just wing it (geddit? WING it? hahaha) but after i saw what happened to hadi and upin, i actually thought up a structured way of doing things.

the real fun of the day came, not from the exhibition itself (obviously), but from the final moments spent with my coursemates. thats it then you lot. i doubt i'd be seeing much of yous after this, which will take some getting used to after seeing you guys roughly everyday of every week for the past 3 years. remember, you guys are buying me lunch with your first paycheck. you'll definitely be missed (sounds morbidly like an obit eh?).

jyajya~n!!


(in a tv-show-announcer-like-voice)
2nd from the left, standing 1.8m tall and weighing 95kg, its Nega Den-O!!! Next, its Kamen Rider Rising Ixa. With a punching power of 20tonnes and a kicking power of 12tonnes, this kamen rider will surely beat any fangire to pulp. and on the right, with a shiny gold armour and a maximum kicking power of 150tonnes (Emperor Moon Break), its Kiva's Emperor Form. oh yeah, and last but by no means least, its Negataros (far left), the imagin who wreaked havoc by teaming up with the fangires.

heheh. lookie look look! i used my raya money to get them. cool arent they? i personally like Kiva's emperor form the most. there's something really awesome about the whole regal look.

i kinda wonder about the target audience of kamen rider shows. i mean, i doubt that kids understand the plot. heck, i dont understand the plot sometimes. take kamen rider den-o for instance. it took me a looong time to process all that info what with the time being destroyed and then restored and the sister's fiance being zeronos and all. seriously, there's more drama in the last 15 episodes of den-o then the whole 90+ episodes of Bella (not that i was watching of course).

therefore, you guys should try watching kamen rider. the action sequence and the effects arent half bad either. but its the plot that would really keep you glued to your seats.

as some of you might have already known, i'm a bit of a stalker. not in a bad way of course. i just like to read people's blogs and make my own assumptions about what goes on in their heads. so there i was, reading people's blogs, when i noticed a massive difference between their posts and mine. other people's entries are always so deep. mine is shallower than the kiddy pool outside of klcc. so i thought to myself 'you've got to post something deep' and i started writing. to my huge disappointment, i never got further than two lines. guess you can't fake depth huh? gyahahaha!!

today we (042 aerospace students) went to wangsa maju for lunch. it was really rather impromptu and fizah ended up missing her last aircraft design class but it was well fun. somehow or other we ended up main teka-teki, like we did during our last outing. here's one. its from petet.

"there are 4 fish in a fish tank. one day, one of the fish dies. the next day, the owner of the fish tank found that the water in the tank was almost at the top. why?"

hello blog, hello people who read this blog (if there are any), been a while hasnt it?

selamat hari raya~

are you done stuffing your faces yet? i reckon the face stuffing gala is only just beginning. prepare your stomachs for more food cause i bet this weekend will bring you even more open houses. isnt raya great? (^_^)

i couldnt sleep two nights ago. it was horrible. i got back to my room from the lab sometime past 11pm. after settling down, i thought i'd catch up on a bit of naruto. after watching 2 one-hour episodes of naruto, i was still wide awake. it was past 2am by then. so i thought i'd just try and sleep but a few minutes of tossing and turning made me realise that my efforts are absolutely futile.

after a few more moments of wondering what i should do (none of which involved getting up and studying), i stumbled across a brilliant idea. baba toru and ookawa genki (yagyu and akaya from tenimyu) both came out with this cd where they count sheep. its called the hitsujide oyasumi series and its basically them counting sheep accompanied by soothing background music. i thought i'd give it a listen and see if it'll help...

baba toru: hitsuji ga ippiki (1 sheep), hitsuji ga niihiki (2 sheep), hitsuji ga sanbiki (3 sheep)...


(half an hour later)


baba toru: hitsuji ga sanbyakuniijuuhiki (320 sheep), hitsuji ga sanbyakuniijuuippiki (321 sheep)...


lets just say that all this would only have been useful if i were a farmer in japan who has 400 sheep.