[ photon velocity ]

I have moved!

2011-08-13T13:49:00.003+08:00

I have shifted my blogging activities to http://xylography.tumblr.com !

Photon Velocity will no longer be updated, so see you at xylography! :D

when mortals become angels

2011-02-24T01:42:00.004+08:00

pooh & elmo

After a day of running around, eating, studying, studying, studying, and eating, I was finally able to take a break from all the madness in my life.

I thought long and hard about how I met you.
By chance.

I thought about how much I enjoy listening to you talk.
Simply inexplicable.

I thought about how well we get along.
It feels like I've known each of you from the moment I inhaled my very first breath of air.

I thought about your zaniness.
I have no idea why it amuses me.

I thought about how we show our sincere care and concern for each other.
Because that's what true friends do.

My colleague, Mark, once told me that he sometimes felt he had a guardian angel with him wherever he went. They aren't fairies. They're real people, mere mortals like you and me.

I feel very blessed to be experiencing that feeling right now. Thank you, my best friends. :)

Math Tells Us Of 3 Tragic Love Stories

2011-02-24T01:24:00.000+08:00

Math tells us 3 of the saddest love stories:

Of parallel lines, who are never meant to meet.

Of tangent lines, who were together once then parted forever.

And of asymptotes, who could only get closer and closer, but could never be together.

awhhhhh.....

This Handwriting Quiz is cute!

2011-02-20T12:28:00.002+08:00

I took the "handwriting personality" quiz on gURL.com
		my handwriting personality is... jocular jotter Your self-confidence and ability to laugh at yourself (you know you're a big dork but you like it) attract lots of admirers and once in a while you get in trouble for being too over-the-top. Read more... What does your handwriting reveal about you?

The call to walk slowly is totally countercultural in a day and age that worships speed and efficiency.

2011-02-18T15:20:00.000+08:00

But to love someone is to walk alongside them.

Thank you, Julia. :)

Don't Disable Your Firewalls!

2011-02-03T00:34:00.003+08:00

Sometimes you don't have to go looking for good friends.

2011-01-29T02:40:00.000+08:00

Life brings them to you. :D

-_-|| or genius?

2010-11-29T01:01:00.003+08:00

"My Boyfriend, Our Army"

The new slogan of the army here.

My first reaction: "SERIOUSLY?!"

Okay, we have a pretty good army (:D), so let's give credit to most of those guys for being intelligent and physically fit.

But seriously... SERIOUSLY? Using the prospect of becoming a girl magnet to attract guys to join the army is the craziest advertising idea used by the army so far.

Because I'm too appalled to think coherently, here's a link to Mr Brown's blog post. Thank you Mr Brown! For some odd reason, we seem to share many similar thoughts on this.

Quotes from his post:
"Or is this to tell young men, "Hey, SAF scholars get all the hot chicks, man! Sign on now!"

"If you watched this commercial, and signed on as a regular because of it, we are doomed."

Nicely done.

The Ukrainian army recruitment advert at the end of his post promotes the same "army guy=chick magnet" idea, except that it's overly exaggerated. (and therefore, funny!... Even the music is unnecessarily dramatic, haha!)

Who knows, maybe these adverts were meant to create a kind of anchoring effect in our young men, like other commercial products. People tend to buy the stuff they see more often. I don't know why. Maybe humans just like familiarity.

At the end of the day, bad publicity is still publicity. :)

My Non-Portable PSP

2010-11-27T15:07:00.004+08:00

Yep, my playstation portable is no longer portable.

Why?

Because it can't charge by USB or by the standard charger. :( In fact, the only way to turn it on is to connect it to the mains while using it. It doesn't even recognise the battery!! Sigh. I hope there wasn't anything that blew up inside. I *really* hope it's just the battery that has gone nuts.

Some forums suggest that a fuse may have blown.

Oh well. One more thing to add to my very short wishlist!

1) 1TB hard disk
2) New PSP battery

By the way, I chanced upon this guy's amazing blog. He hacks and mods video game consoles and other stuff. Recently, he jazzed up his self-made portable xbox 360! I can't believe that I've only found his blog now... Better late than never! :D :D :D

Ben Heck's Official Blog

Premonitions

2010-11-23T17:53:00.005+08:00

17 November 2010, Evening
Feeling bored of studying, I decided to take my DSLR out to take photos of my turtles. I don't know why, I just felt like it.

21 November 2010, Sunday, 9pm
Sitting in front of my laptop, this song suddenly popped into my head.

优客李林 - 认错

“我又怎么告诉你我还爱你？”
“是我自己错误的决定。。。”

Yeah it's a really old song (1991) but it's kinda nice. :) (I've never seen the music video, but yes, it's a real cheesy video, so just listening to the song is a good idea.)
I didn't know why I thought of that song.

This morning, I knew why.

Photo taken on 17th November 2010

My favourite turtle, Shun Shun, left the earth this morning. I was about to feed them their breakfast when I realised that she was just laying there, motionless, with her eyes shut, and her hands neatly placed by her side.

She didn't eat much for the past few days, which was kind of odd. Two days ago, the water in their tank started to smell really bad very often.

The other turtle had been attacking her pretty often this week, and I was seriously considering separating them. But I remembered how sad my aunt's turtle was when my mum and I separated it from its violent friend, so I decided against it.

Photo also taken on 17 November 2010. As you can see, nearly half of her tail was bitten off by that crazy turtle.

I don't know whether she died because of her injuries, an illness, or my decision of not to separate them. Whatever it is, my heart still believes that I caused her death. And I feel extremely bad about it, so this post is dedicated to her. Sigh. So here's my message to my turtle.

++++++++++++
Wherever your soul resides now, I want you to know that everyone in my family loves you! I'm really, truly sorry if I did something wrong to cause your departure. We will always remember how adorable you were, how you blew little bubbles in the water for fun, and how you yawned or burped from time to time. You have been the best turtle, ever. We will miss you dearly.
++++++++++++

Not sure if you believe in reincarnation... In either case, just in case there is such a thing, I hope my turtle's soul will enjoy a good life in her next reincarnation.

Sniff. Love my turtle. >_<... May she rest in peace.

I love...

2010-11-22T22:42:00.003+08:00

my fantastic family and friends.

my friend's wonderful mum.

the exhilarating sense of release I feel after each exam.

watching movies. :D

good food.

cuddly soft toys.

air-con on a sweltering day.

acts of kindness.

I wish I could attach a photo to each of those things written above, but I guess those warm, fuzzy feelings they can give you is enough. :D

My laptop has a good chance of passing the Turing test!

2010-11-18T17:34:00.009+08:00

Trying out last year's cg1101 paper... And I forgot how to read in a text file with the string of numbers "111" such that the 1s will be split up in an array...
My computer laughed!

Here's a closer look!

Cheeky computer.
On hindsight, it must have been tracking what I've typed so far, or it wouldn't have known that colon D is my favourite emoticon. :D

/*EDIT!*/

I finally figured it out, after 1 hour of frustration. And I don't feel any smarter. On the contrary, I think my intelligence today has hit an all-new low. Must sleep by 11pm from now on. >_<

In case anyone had trouble with that too, (I doubt so, but anyway!!) here's the code.

Note the 4. NOTE THE 4.

Bleddy number 4 wasted 1hr of my youth!!!!! To make it worse, I'm gonna be 20 soon.
ARGHHHHH

Have a nice day, everyone. :D

A Sudden Burst Of Inspiration

2010-11-13T22:41:00.003+08:00

Creativity struck while I was revising for the final year exams!

My entry for NUSPS's photo of the month. This month's theme is 'destruction'. It reflects how I feel right now. I feel really sick of studying, and I really need a break from all this madness. I need to spend some quality time with my family and friends. And take more photos! (my poor little camera feels under-utilised...) hehe.

This was taken during the basic photography course conducted by NUSPS this year.

Just as how the old adage goes, "You can never know when true love comes knocking on your door", my thoughts run wildly into the very sought-after zone of creativity during the strangest of times.

“Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.” - George Bernard Shaw

brain hack!

2010-11-04T02:48:00.003+08:00

Just broke one of my own records!

Haven't slept a wink since 5am today... which means that I have stayed awake for nearly 22 hours consecutively.

All thanks to the tutorials. Luckily, this week's tutorials are pretty easy. In fact, I'm stunned by how fast I completed this week's cs1231 tutorial! It usually takes me ages.
But surface integrals for ma1505 is another story. :P It's a different; depressingly melancholic story... That's the way it goes for engineering math, I suppose?

while(student_status=alive)
Practice(paper, ink, a hell lot of time, a hell lot of hard work);

Darn. I couldn't resist typing that. :P

Before I get some well-deserved sleep, here's a really interesting site I found today:
http://dustincurtis.com/index.html

This guy writes about pretty interesting stuff... And meticulously places them in magazine-like templates. His designing skills are really good too! You gotta read it to appreciate how much effort he spends on writing interesting essays, accompanied with equally, if not more awesome website designs which he creates for EACH essay! Now that's unorthodox. :D It really set my imagination ablaze. Whee!

Did you know that it might be possible to 'hack' your brain (not with a blunt metal object, hehehe) so that you don't have to sleep so many hours every night... while still feeling energetic throughout the day?

http://dustincurtis.com/sleep.html

I don't think most of us are in a good position to try this, though. The time schedule which society considers to be 'normal' is way too widespread for us to take so many short naps throughout the day. Nevertheless, it's an intriguing idea.

-----------------------------------------------

The welfare pack from the SoC computer club actually contains a GLOWING STICK!!! Oddly, my mum was the one who found it in the pack. I was oblivious to it until she told me. :P How thoughtful of them to appeal to the inner geek in all SoCians! :D :D :D (i.e. lightsaber substitute, since I don't think anyone has figured out how to stop/break a laser beam in mid-air without blocking it with any visible material??)

My childhood days are long gone, but I just can't stop marvelling at how the liquid in the stick appears to be yellow in light, and glows a very mesmerizing blue when you view it in the dark. No matter how old you are, you just HAVE to admit that glowing sticks are SO COOL! :D Thank you, computer club!

is this the life of a programmer? if it is, then for the sake of my sanity, I'm not going to be one. O_o

2010-11-03T05:39:00.004+08:00

cg1101 lab was the terrible-*st* lab, ever.

I was trying to do it since the weekend, but a flu virus took over my nose (and brain), causing me to feel woozy all the time. (teethers and wobbles around...) The medication only exacerbated the drowsiness I felt... and so did my blocked nose, which probably cut off some oxygen supply to my body. :S With all the other tutorials to complete, it felt like my life just hit an all-time new low.

Thanks to the help from so many nice people in my life, I finally got it done last night around 11pm. Even more thanks to my aunt's friend, Jasmin, who took time off her super hectic schedule this week to help me with the recursion qn 1e. :) My aunt also came to my house with loads and loads of nice food, and a much-needed pore pack which I wanted to buy, haha! Thank you all so much! :D
After much trouble trying to print it... (I was so tired that I kept printing stuff on the wrong sides of the papers!!! >_<) Yep. I took my medication, drank a cup of water, replied my aunt's friend, watched big bang theory season 4 episode 6 (damn funny, as usual!) and went to sleep around 1am.

I have no idea why I abruptly woke up at 5am today. I tried and tried to force myself back to sleep, but nooo... I couldn't sleep. This random thought of assigning a different variable name to my blocked nose could cause me to stop breathing forever, because the rest of my bodily program need to have their variable names for my nose changed, too. Deciding that I may be losing my sanity, I replied my aunt's friend again (how nice of her to reply last night!), and started to write this post.

This almost feels like recursion, because my thoughts in this post just went in a big circle, back to this post.

Now, let's read my daily horoscope on iGoogle...

Gemini

By Rick Levine

You are set on having a good time, but you might not be willing to jump into the flow of fun until after you finish tying up some loose ends. Taking care of them today can free you up to enjoy yourself, but ignoring previous obligations could invite unnecessary problems toward the end of the week. Work now and play later.

Generic as it is (who DOESN'T LOVE HAVING A GOOD TIME?!)... I gotta admit the iGoogle horoscope is the most frequently accurate daily online horoscope that I've found so far. Final exams in 3 weeks... Can't argue with the last line! :D

The Oddities of the World.

2010-10-27T00:28:00.001+08:00

A sonogram caught this foetus ''rocking out'' in his mum's womb.

Click here to visit the news article.

Rock on, yo! :D

Everyone could do with a little motivation!

2010-10-14T23:17:00.004+08:00

The sunrise this morning was one of the most mesmerizing ones that I've seen in Singapore.

An azure sky painted with glowing streaks and patches of clouds. The golden sun rose slowly, casting shadows on the clouds and giving their edges greater definition.

I really like how the position of the sun gave this HDR-like effect to the clouds, thanks to the shadows. :D Just amazing. (and amusing at the same time. whee!)

That makes me feel like 'frying the frag of hwachong high'. Hehe.

this blog template is starting to look boring.

2010-10-13T22:20:00.002+08:00

Hopefully, having all the links here in uncomfortably glaring shades of pink will spruce it up a little! :D

I just had a long heart-to-heart talk with my mum about friends, and now I really wish that I could go back in time to become a primary school student. Relationships were so simple back then. One could befriend another for just as long as he/she wished, because a simple proclamation of "I don't friend you!" would quickly extricate toxic friends from one's life.

Now that we're all grown up now, we often force ourselves to dilute the strong emotions we had during our childhood. Now, we can't get rid of poisons from our lives so easily. We have to conceal how we really feel in order to avoid unpleasant situations, and I can't stand doing that for much longer.

It's really sad to think about how many people (other than my family) there are in this world that I can trust and love without any reservations. On the other hand, it's really a great blessing that I have these people in my lives; there are many people out there who live meaningless lives with ever-changing grocery lists of mild acquaintances.

On a side note, I am a firm believer of the old adage, "the more you share, the more you gain". It's a value which has been deeply rooted in me, especially when applied to knowledge. This doesn't mean giving some revolutionary stuff (which you took 10 years to invent) away to the world for free, because I think 99% of humans are not capable of actions like that. If you actually did that, the world would nominate you for the Nobel Peace Prize.

The old kung-fu master thinking of 'I'm not gonna share everything with my disciples, just in case they triumph me!' is reasonable in the cut-throat corporate world, but it should not be applied to everything in life. This is the open-source era, people. Google, Wikipedia, Linux, and free apps are just a few famous examples of how sharing has made the world a better and happier place. :)

I can't take down a mountain all by myself; but together, we can.

Nice SEO, blogger!

2010-09-29T23:52:00.003+08:00

The above title has been injected with sarcasm. *shows sarcasm sign*

Alright. Those who haven't watched enough of the Big Bang Theory probably won't get that joke. :D

The hits on my blog have curiously jumped by 42 counts today. Why? I just realised why.

At least 42 people have googled for something which includes the phrase "CS1231 Midterm". And by some google/blogger magic, it's the 4th search result from the top. Wow. That was really unprecedented.

So... I guess I'm not the only chronic googler around? :D

I really want to finish off the MA1505 vectors tutorial right now, because of the sporadic pangs of guilt which have struck me. (ever since Pei Yi reminded me about it this evening) Darn, I've spent so much time preparing for the mid-terms that my usual schooling schedule is completely out of whack.

The despicable trait of laziness has, once again, emerged victorious from the magnificently well-ordered depths of logic.

We make really bad decisions when we're tired, don't we?

Off to watch The Outer Limits. Whee!

(Argh. Can't wait for channel 5 to start broadcasting the 3rd season of Fringe!)

CS1231 Midterm: Reflections

2010-09-29T07:40:00.004+08:00

I was kinda concerned about the difficulty level of the paper rising, since this was the first open book test for CS1231. (apparently the past exams were not open book)

Finishing the mcqs in around 10mins gave me some confidence, but the structured questions scared the hell out of me..... Even though I had 50mins left. -_-|| Especially the first order predicate logic questions. That made me realise that I had spent too much time on the Relations and Sets chapters. (I didn't understand them very well before the mid-term break)

Prof Bressan was standing next to me; staring at my answers for the predicate logic question. I was feeling so terrible because I was panicking as soon as I realised that I wasn't able to converse in predicate logic after all! All I can do is read them. It's kinda like Japanese. I can read and sorta understand *some* Japanese, but I can't speak or write Japanese fluently. Guess I need much more practice on that.

Having spent so much effort and time on the Relations chapter, I was expecting to breeze through the last question. BUT NOOOO..... The panicky feeling from the predicate question remained, and I took a very long time to understand the question. By some stroke of luck, I somehow managed to prove (contrapositive proof, I think) the first part of the question. (but I omitted the proof to show that there exists an X such that x is related to y. Damn, I just thought of the answer when I woke up this morning, after only 6 hrs of sleep. If only I realised that letting y=x would result in a singleton where xRx!!!)

Sadly, I left the last page blank because I couldn't even understand the question after all that panicking. Sigh. How could I have spent THAT much time panicking?? Strangely, I thought of the answer after showering last night. Maybe it's really true that people are the most creative when they're in the bathroom. :P

Undoubtedly, this paper was much harder than those in the previous years. Maybe I have not prepared well enough. :/ Maybe nearly getting hit on the head by a huge tree branch (while walking to technoedge) before the exam was a bad omen? :P (be careful if you hear a loud crack from above while walking under tall trees! If I had walked a step slower, that damned branch would definitely have knocked the top of my head, spot on.)

Let us all seek solace in the fact that this isn't the paper which constitutes 60% of our final grade.

This means that attaining that A+ (or some variation of A) is not impossible, just kinda improbable if I don't practice even more questions for the finals.

We have about 2 months left. That's a lot of time.

Let's all continue working hard towards that goal! :D

If you want your dreams to come true…

2010-09-11T20:02:00.001+08:00

Don’t sleep too much!

Hehe, what an appropriate quote! (especially since this is a long weekend)

The Konami Code, and more cool stuff! (Information overload alert)

2010-09-11T02:03:00.004+08:00

(warning: long post with lots and lots and LOTSSS of links!)

If you played a few video games as a kid, you may remember the button-mashing games from Japan... like Street Fighter.

Well, we're not completely honest people, are we?

I know you've used a game cheat code before. ;D

It seems like the gaming nerds of the past have made a silent comeback... in the form of the Konami Code.

It's everywhere, it's even on Facebook! :O

Check out KonamiCodeSites.com for a list of websites which do weird things when you enter the code. :D This is so geeky and wonderfully weird but IT'S SO COOL(!!!) that it's actually keeping me awake at 2am.

Simply enter the following code on your keyboard:
up up down down left right left right A B
and press 'enter'!

The konamicodesites.com thingy will even work on an iPhone. I tried it! :D

Talking about iPhones, this guy owns the manufacturing company that MAKES iPhones. Apparently, many people from his factory have committed suicide. (btw, his company employs 800,000 people. WOW.)

see how he looks like in an arty photo.

To be honest (hehe), I found out about this (and the video about motivation below) on this guy's blog. Linking back eases my conscience.

www.feross.org

He's a computer science student at Stanford, and he created the YouTube Instant thingy as a spoof of the recently introduced Google Instant. Google likes his sense of humour, and so do I.

My psychic abilities tell me that he might be getting a job offer from a company with a name that begins with 'G' real soon.

(ya rrrright...)

Anyways. I like his blog so much that I can't help posting some of his favourite quotations too! Here's a quote that made me laugh:

I may have invented Control-Alt-Delete, but Bill Gates made it famous.
— David Bradley, designer of the IBM PC

And another one:

[To a class of Stanford CS106B students]
You should try opening up the C++ STL header files some time — it will be a very eye-opening experience, sort of how looking directly at the Sun is a eye-opening –err, eye-closing experience.
— Keith Schwarz

Omg, I can't break out of this random-information-posting craze yet!!! Here's a HDR video (!!!) which was found through www.hckr.com:
Watch the coolness unravel before your eyes!

I'm kinda nit-picking here, but I'm not sure whether the people who made the video avoided panning the cameras (on purpose!) because of the rolling shutter effect. Hmmm :/ But whatever. Shooting a HDR video is a brilliant idea!

If you're bored, and you've noticed Google's Easter Eggs, try this out.
http://dotty-dots.appspot.com/
Type in whatever you want, and the flash applet thingy turns it into colourful dots which happily bounce around. Your cursor can even repel them. Really cute. :)

Now it seems like my blog is just a place where I show everyone the interesting sites that I've found in the middle of the night. Hehe.

Looking at the clock, I think I'm going to wake up at 12pm tomorrow. Again!
Good night everybody. :)

What motivates you?

2010-09-11T01:48:00.002+08:00

This presentation by Dan Pink will grab your attention like a ravenous lion tearing the raw flesh of another animal with its sharp fangs...

Astronomy Photography

2010-09-11T00:56:00.002+08:00

Astronomy is a topic I got interested in about 2 years ago. Photography is a hobby I picked up about a year ago.

Their union is really inspiring!

Here's the audio-slideshow for the 2010 Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition (held by the Royal Observatory in Greenwich) which was posted on BBC's site. I guarantee (plus 10 'chops') that it's worth your time!
Click me to view the slideshow :D

That was posted on the 10th of September. Which is actually yesterday (because it's 1am now) but feels like today, because I woke up at 2pm today. That is now my record for waking up late. Anyone managed to beat that? :P

If you feel all astronomy-ish after the slideshow, check out the official Flick group for this competition at http://www.flickr.com/groups/astrophoto. Once again, I guarantee (plus 10 'chops') that you will find something *reallyyy* impressive!

Weird Habits, and Nice Quotes.

2010-09-05T21:44:00.007+08:00

“Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”
- Aristotle

Go Aristotle! That was spot-on.

I just realised that one of his little pieces of wisdom is one of my innate beliefs:

"A friend to all is a friend to none."

Yep. Those with lots of friends usually don't really know who their true friends are... Or just prefer to maintain superficial relationships. My mum is a living example. She frequently tells me that she doesn't have any trustworthy friends at all, in spite of her magnificent social network which never fails to leave me in awe. (but then again, who cares about friends when you're 20, and you've got a smart AND hardworking boyfriend in NUS who takes real good care of you!!? :D)

That's a sad situation (which the person may not be aware of); but it's also not an unexpected consequence, because a lot of time has to be invested into a friendship before sturdy links of trust build up.

Here is another quote about friendship which you may find very true too.

“Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, 'What! You too? I thought I was the only one!”
- C.S. Lewis

(Just like how I thought I was the only one among my friends to enter computer engineering (CEG)... and later came to know that Pei Yi and Belle were in this course too! Kaypoh note: I think this guy in my CEG cohort was from HCI too...)

In the past 3 weeks, I've had the weird habit of sleeping past 2am on Fridays, waking up around 11am-12pm on Saturdays, sleeping at 3am on Saturdays, and then waking up at 12pm on Sundays. This is really bad. I think it's taking a toll on my alertness... So I'm going to sleep at 11pm today! :D

“When late morning rolls around and you're feeling a bit out of sorts, don't worry; you're probably just a little eleven o'clockish.”
- Winnie the Pooh

Have you ever inspected your work during tutorials and compared them to your tutor's answer, realised that your work is correct, and then suddenly find yourself unable to comprehend your own work? That happens to me pretty often. Oscar Wilde shares our experience too!

“I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.”
- Oscar Wilde

Oh my!!! I don't understand a single thing that I typed above.

Maybe I need to check if I've got amnesia...

In case you were wondering, these quotes were obtained from www.thinkexist.com! :D

The Big Bang Theory - The Friendship Algorithm

2010-09-02T21:55:00.001+08:00

This show is really hilarious!
In a highly innovative (and should I say... desperate) attempt to expand the radius of his social circle, Sheldon creates the friendship algorithm... And tests it out on his friend.

Counters are useful. :D

The Pizza Shirt

2010-08-31T01:38:00.002+08:00

After completing the CG1101 tutorial, I was in a nerdy mood. So I visited www.thinkgeek.com and saw this great shirt!

Click me! The shirt says pi*z*z*a!

BRILLIANT! :D

Pizza reminds me of KFC. And KFC, in turn, reminds me of my mum, who just told me that she felt like eating KFC after watching their advertisement on the TV. Haha :D

the most epic simplification of a logic formula, in my opinion.

2010-08-30T00:16:00.008+08:00

Welcome to Professor Ripley's gallery of Diabolical Logic Formulas!

Today, we present to you the nefarious gargoyle of a logic formula which the project team of the writer of this blog was asked to solve:

Exhibit 38:

This monstrous entity... With countless wriggling tentacles of parentheses, fearsome horns of arrows, and a colossal number of variables was bound to fill the young, innocent hearts of year 1 students in the CS1231 course with ominous clouds of despair...

Fortunately, their tutor had the rare, kind heart to tell them about this monster's only weakness.

It was the ultimate weapon.

A Karnaugh Map.

A group of young warriors thus embarked upon the noble quest of slaying this vicious fiend by the 10th of September.

Terrible mental battles strained the cranial resources of the young warriors, as they relentlessly drew upon their brain power in their attempts to understand the inner workings of the ultimate weapon.

Finally, they were ready. They frantically created a truth table for the monster (with the help of the internet, of course), for the deadline to execute this monster was nearing. Now that they had the truth table and comprehended the Karnaugh Map, they knew the methodical, sure-win approach of slaying this gargantuan beast.

Bracing themselves for the worst, they plugged in the Boolean values for each of the 16 attacks that the monster could possibly unleash upon them into the Karnaugh Map.

The monster stared at them quizzically, for the young warriors possessed no fearsome weapons or bulletproof Kevlar armor. All they had... was a mighty pen and a pathetic, crumpled piece of scrap paper which had seen better days.

As they worked out the simplified logic formula from the Karnaugh Map, the mighty beast disintegrated slowly, but surely.

The brave young warriors stood in shock. The remains of the fearsome creature lay in an inconspicuous pile of dust on the very ground they stood on.

"Wow," they exclaimed delightedly, in unison.

"That is... seriously... all that's left of the goliath which once towered menacingly above us. ".

All that was left, were the three symbols: S^Q.

---------------------------------------------------------

(seriously, this is too good to be true! :D)

I really tested the limits of my imagination (or does my imagination have limits at all?) when thinking of that story. That story is probably as good as my narratives can ever get for an essay of self-entertainment. Hahahahaha :D Have a great week ahead, everyone!

Thanks For The Memories.

2010-08-28T00:32:00.004+08:00

That's what I was doing a moment ago. Looking back at my older posts, I have noticed the following phenomena:

1) the number of blog posts made by me has increased over the years.

2) my general mood over the 3+ years since my blog was set up kinda takes on the shape of a cosine graph: from the happy-go-lucky days in TKGS when I wrote about lighthearted topics (cos(0)=1) to the frustrating days in HCI, when I strove to meet a never-ending list of deadlines, questioned if I was becoming a worse person (cos(pi)=-1), and had fun with my team mates while making Ambi (cos(pi+some real positive integer)=some number >-1), and finally to the recent posts about my happiness with NUS (cos(2pi)=1). (or should I say, happi-NUS!)

3) The older posts were more happy-looking because they were so colourful. Are monotone blog posts a sign of old age? :P

That's the nice(?) thing about having a blog. You can go back in time to experience the emotions you felt years ago. Good or bad, happy or sad, they allow me to understand how I have become the person I am today. Self doubts have been clarified: Now I know that my tendency towards introversion is not a bad thing, because it doesn't mean that I'm antisocial. It just means that I need a little more 'me-time' than everyone else in order to keep my sanity intact. I think I've matured a little.

Today, I decided to go brisk walking for an hour three times a week to prevent myself from becoming a 'slackademic'. (in the physical way) The treadmill prompted me to choose a program at the beginning, and then told me to enter my age for it to determine the level of intensity of my workout. I pressed and held down the minus sign button on the treadmill until the number dropped to 19. As I looked at the number to confirm my age, a thought just struck me.

"I'm going to be 20 soon."

20. That's like a symbol of adulthood to me.

I don't know about you, but I still feel pretty much like a teenager. I'm not in a relationship like many people of my age, and in the past, I chose not to be in one; so now, I can do almost whatever I want, whenever I want. (and that freedom is nice :D) I've got no kids, no job, no loans on hand, and almost nothing to worry about... except my studies, of course. If I still looked like a kid, and if NUS is a primary school, I would be no different from any primary school kid.

My personality has changed a little, but my life doesn't seem to have changed at all.

Weird!

Going to finish off my programming tutorial 2, programming lab exercise, discrete maths Karnaugh diagram question for the group project, the second mathematics tutorial, AND the Mastering Physics online exercise. (Plus re-work the questions in the insanely difficult physics tutorial 1 again, if there's time to spare.)

Whew. The programming tutorials may be relatively easy, but they're getting rather lengthy. :P Now, I feel thankful to my JC for drowning us in homework... I've turned into a fish ever since. Bring on the pacific ocean!

geek on the run!

2010-08-24T22:56:00.004+08:00

A sudden attack of stubbornly persistent general saltiness (i.e. sian-ness) over the weekend prompted me to get some of my blood pumping today. So I decided to skip the last two questions of my physics tutorial do just that. (wheehee!)

Surprisingly, my usual (ok... not that usual, actually) routine of brisk walking at 6km/h on the 'foothills' mode for 30mins on the treadmill only drained me when I was on the first 'hill', which felt like a 45 degree incline. Oucchhhh.

That's why it's good to blast music through your earphones when you're exercising! (especially cascada's songs) It drowned out the incessant complaints of my whiny legs.

I'm so happy that I could for another round after some weight-pulling (so as to not hog the treadmill for too long)! A full hour!!! :D Plus I didn't feel exceptionally tired after that. It was surprisingly refreshing. Note to everyone: exercise more and you'll start to feel ENERGETIC IN SCHOOL! :D

(But of course, I don't know if my legs are going to hurt like crazy tomorrow. All I know is that my appetite has improved, and I feel unsalted. Like a healthy organic peanut. Mmmm. Crrrrunchy...)

I was wearing the athena faculty shirt while exercising, and while I was watching the TV, I noticed a guy staring at me. (???) This situation is obviously rarely encountered by people like me, so I looked down from the television.

Lo and behold.

It was Brad Pitt.

Ok, no it wasn't. Angelina Jolie would have whacked his brains out of him, yelling something along the lines of "SINCE WHEN WERE YOU INTO GEEKS!!??". (she's right, I don't think I've ever been anyone's romantic interest. hmm. maybe my new laptop?)

It was our dear faaamily member, Ang Wee Hiong. I am not joking here. He just came out of the pool in his swimming trunks. And if your imagination is running wild (I can't imagine why, though), I'm gonna take the chance to fuel it a little. Nope, he wasn't wearing a shirt. Just his very tight swimming trunks..... Which is a rather peculiar choice of swimwear for men of his age, in my opinion.

Since I was oblivious to his presence, (c'mon, I was on my 2nd round!) he walked away. His 90%-10% signature hair parting was in full view. Now, how could anyone forget that? (and now, we all know where he lives...)

By the way, Nina, thank you so much for the little spheres of pudding-flavoured happiness. :D I just took a picture of it, but the file size is kinda big, so I'm lazy to upload it now... hehe. But it really, really made my day. Thank you so much! :)

Because I thought that it was an interesting way to end my day, (i.e. seeing my ex-principal) I'm going to end this post with some interesting nerdy news from the one and only /.!!!

1) Bet you didn't know that there's a US National HELIUM Reserve?!
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/08/23/1419233/Why-the-World-Is-Running-Out-of-Helium

2) Bad news for terrorists: Bet you can't fake someone's BONES during identity checks!
http://www.physorg.com/news201454875.html

Have a nice school week ahead, everyone! :D

What's Your Type?

2010-08-21T12:38:00.004+08:00

I don't mind ignoring the handsome bit. But that would leave me with only one choice...
Life's like this, eh.

(btw I apologise for the use of profanities in the graph, I just happened to find it on a website.)

Our experience in NUS confirms the veracity of this pie chart. (I don't fb during class, yay!)

This is so ridiculous that it's actually funny!

IS THIS FOR REAL?!

2010-08-21T00:13:00.007+08:00

You know, I don't regret choosing NUS. I have enjoyed my life there pretty much so far, and I find that I can understand most of the stuff going on in the lectures. I even like most of the lecturers very much for their clear explanations. It's a great place to be in. (and the no.1 place where I get lost in...)

The GEM2901 (Reporting Statistics in the Media) lecturer, Associate Professor Chua Tin Chiu, is a memorable character indeed. He is... quite the funnyman/smart guy, appearing in Lianhe Wanbao and giving his academic opinion on whether numbers related to famous events (such as Huang Na's murder) have a higher chance of appearing in the 4D winning list of numbers.

Well, it turns out that he has done statistical consulting for KPMG (oooh) and some government agencies. I ain't kidding about that.

My CS1231 (Discrete Structures) lecture, Associate Professor Stephane Bressan, has been teaching in NUS since 1998, and graduated from the Ecole University in France (wooowwww) in 1987. In fact, from 1996 to 1998, he was a research associate in MIT's Sloan School of Management. WOWWW!!! ARE YOU KIDDING ME! (that's my dream school...) Yep. That probably explains why he can make such an abstract topic make sense to a mathematical layperson like me. Pei fu, pei fu.

Talking about abstract topics reminds me of my lecturer for CG1101(Programming Methodology), Professor Tan Keng Yan, Colin. This guy is the opposite of what I expected programming lecturers to be like. (i.e. boring and incomprehensible.) Luckily for us CEG students, he is interesting AND fully comprehensible. My mum could've coded simple C programs with his lectures. I bet I would have understood some basics of C programming from the first 2 lectures even if I'd never gone for the project in NUS's Social Robotics Lab. Plus, he's friendly and hilarious too! For now, this programming course is wayyy better than I imagined. :D And I think it's going to remain this way. He has a few funny websites that made me laugh, too. He is apparently called Polar Bear, due to his sheer size (he's not that big sized... maybe he lost some weight lately?) and love of raw fish. I don't get it. :P But his wedding website is really sweet and hilarious, I wonder which genius of comedy wrote the content.

Why yes, my PC1432 (Physics IIE) lecturer, Associate Professor Edward Teo Ho Khoon (who recently shocked himself accidentally with charged plates connected to a wimhurst machine thingy during a very exciting live demonstration in his lecture) probably has one of the most impressive CVs. (and one of the highest foreheads and penetrating gazes I've seen in my life)

Just take a look at this page. My jaws were gaping so widely that a fat housefly might have found the orifice formed in the process a nice, cosy place to rest in. I mean, this guy is conducting research on "multi black hole solutions", negative energies and STRING THEORY!? He's a child prodigy who obtained his PhD from the University of Cambridge at TWENTY ONE years old??? (umm, come to think of it. If he finished his PhD at 21, when did he serve the NS?)

\ /

- - BOOM! - -

/ \

My brain is now exploding, his achievements are too impressive. As the average freshman, I'll only be in year 3 when I'm 21. We are learning physics from a GENIUS! :D Is that cool or what! :D

On second thought, maybe it's exploding because some negative mass from Prof Teo's research came into contact with my head. Oops, watch that bit of my brain flying out from your computer screen. I am truly sorry for dirtying your screen. :(

Dang, I should've been more careful when I was sitting in the front of the lecture theatre during physics. :P

By the way, this is my lecturer for MA1505 (Mathematics).
Associate Professor Leung Pui Fai. And I just found out that he has an English name! He's called Fred, like that popular brand called Fred Perry. (I see so many people with a Fred Perry shirt/bag/shoes everywhere.) Check out his list of publications. Yet again, I am impressed.

Who knows? His research on geometry may have led him to create the logo/designs of the ridiculously popular Fred Perry fashion items. I mean, with a grown-up child prodigy and a guy who did research at MIT in the past teaching me in NUS, I am now mentally prepared to expect anything from NUS. ANYTHING! :D

There isn't a word I can use to aptly describe how I feel about the lecturers who have taught me in NUS so far.
But I know the natural sound that social conventions dictate I should make in such a situation.
It's a resounding WOW.

(and no, I didn't mean for that to stand for World of Warcraft. Has the Starcraft fever gotten to you?)

I hope that most of you in NUS right now think that you've made the right choice too. :)

Trying something different.

2010-08-06T19:01:00.003+08:00

Woof woof!
Ribbit. Ribbit.

Every dog has its day. Or maybe, in this case, its FROG DAY. Sometimes, breaking away from the stuff you're used to can be fun.

Just bought the Alienware M11x-R2 with the i7 processor and 8GB for RAM. A big WHEEE for the tech specs! :D And nope, I'm not gaming with it because I'm afraid that I'm going to get addicted. :P Just got reminded of the newspaper report which said that the first guy in the queue for Starcraft2 in Singapore was reduced to tears because he was overwhelmed with emotion. Hehehe!

Not my usual kind of laptop though. It kinda looks like a sports car... and is kinda hefty at 2kg.

I got it from Challenger. (Surprisingly, they offer a better deal than the Dell shops...) They didn't have any more stocks for the silver version... Nevermind. Mummy always says that not all great husbands are handsome. :P Love the keyboard! Posting up more pics when I get it next Wednesday. :D

My dad and I had lunch at the NUS Arts Faculty canteen before we headed for the Funan IT Mall. Seeing so many touchy-feely couples around us made me feel extremely awkward... :S Excessive mushiness aside, I thought that this was an interesting development. My dad dated my mum in the FASS, and now I'm with him in the very same place where he dated my mum. Dad sees nothing odd with that, though. :O Another interesting thing that happened was that the drinks stall uncle in FASS was the SAME drinks stall uncle my dad used to buy drinks from in FASS!!!!! (btw, my dad was the second batch of NUS students. Bet you just felt a lot of respect for this uncle!)

Happy National Day holidays everyone! :D

if you're feeling sick of modern music and dance moves...

2010-07-27T17:37:00.002+08:00

this guy might just cheer you up!

Never Gonna Give You Up by Rick Astley

(I can't embed the video here... sigh.)

Dance moves used to be THAT cool! XD

The comments peppered throughout the video are really funny. Happy watching! :D

Know that guy who took a picture of himself, everyday, for 6 years?

2010-07-01T16:22:00.001+08:00

Homer Simpson did it too!

http://vimeo.com/776824

Do you like soybeans?

2010-06-30T14:02:00.001+08:00

Random Fact:

Henry Ford was obsessed with soybeans. He once wore a suit and tie made from soy-based material, served a 16-course meal made entirely from soybeans, and ordered many Ford auto parts to be made from soy-derived plastic.

Fringe is an interesting show!

2010-06-18T14:10:00.001+08:00

Walter Bishop, a highly intelligent scientist (whose brain is often found tethering close to the brink of insanity), said something like this in the show...

'The greatest of minds often converge upon the same idea.

Newton and Leibniz invented calculus at almost the same time.'

Is this scarily true, or scarily true?

2010-06-18T11:16:00.001+08:00

Horoscope of the day from my iGoogle homepage:

Gemini
By Rick Levine

A family member or close friend may be relying on you for stability today, even though this isn't normally your greatest strength. However, you can be a real anchor for loved ones now, keeping them from drifting off in a storm of intense emotions. Maybe it's your natural skill of being able to tread lightly that makes you the go-to person of the day. Whatever the reason, don't waste energy doubting your ability to help. Just jump in and do it.

Please refer the post just before this one. THIS IS INSANE!!!

BGRs are so damn complicated.

2010-06-17T23:04:00.002+08:00

It's no wonder that psychology can only be found in degree courses and courses beyond that academic standard...

Not that I'm in one, well... I have zero experience in that.

But listening to your problems has made me worried for you. All that I can do to help you is offer you advice, but my inexperience in this field makes me doubt myself.

It also makes me wonder if having a life partner is something that I really want in the future.

decisions, decisions.

2010-06-14T23:25:00.005+08:00

Even the doctor doesn't know what I am sick with. He just gave me medicine to relieve the symptoms, and an MC to excuse me from work.

Blocked nose + cough + 38deg fever = ?

Apparently, it has nothing to do with the tonsillitis I just recovered from slightly over 2 weeks ago. He says it's due to a weak immune system, which I attribute to awesome stuff like

THIS

which I ate a lot of during my birthday week. Hehe!

That's a lava cake from NYDC. (ni yao de cai/new york dessert cafe/not your disc compartment)
It pretty much tastes like lots of chocolate and concentrated milo. Ooh.

So during my 3-day recovery period at home, I've been eating more stuff like

THIS

in a last-minute attempt to lead a healthy lifestyle. Hahaha :D

On a normal day, which would you rather choose? Hmm? ;)

This is why I like this guy.

2010-06-12T22:33:00.001+08:00

“Why is it that nobody understands me, yet everybody likes me?”

—Albert Einstein

Quoted in an interview with the New York Times, March 12,1944.

Insightful! XD

Touchable Holograms

2010-06-09T11:01:00.002+08:00

http://www.physorg.com/news168797748.html

This is really interesting! I've spent so many moments of my TV-watching life with my arm over the subwoofer, just to feel the power of the sound. Kudos to the professors at Tokyo University for thinking up such a great application for this! :D

How is it possible that I have never discovered this website before?!

Pun Intended.

2010-06-02T22:33:00.003+08:00

That's right. Whether it's at the office or at home (after working hours), I just prefer some peace and quiet. Chatting and joking is fine, but right now, telephone rings absolutely irk me.

Oh man. I'm already sick of this job, and I can't believe how fast my interest fizzles out. My interest levels behave like a can of coke. The slightest pull on the metal tab just ignites all the little bubbles of interest in me; they're dying to soar and burst into the air. Leave the can out in the air for a mere 10 minutes, and the bubbles are all gone.

Now I know what's holding me back -- responsibility.

In the future, I'll have to either be lucky enough to find a great job, or learn how to stick to a boring job with decent pay for the sake of my family (if I'm lucky enough to have one of my own). My heart is in awe; it's enthralled by how long my parents managed to stick to their jobs.

If I had a choice, I'd like a really exciting and slightly challenging job in a dynamic workplace. I've been pondering over this for a long time. Adrian suggested being a secret agent/spy. Nice. :D Do inform me if you know of any spy agencies. I hope they don't mind someone who can't run very quickly, haha. :)

Here are some jobs I thought of during dinner:
- animator (e.g. Pixar)
- freelance photographer?
- game designer/programmer?
- game TESTER!! :D

"Food taster" is absent from the above list, because 1) I only thought of it because I was really hungry before dinner, and 2) It's not challenging at all, is it? :P

a little bokeh trick.

2010-05-31T22:34:00.008+08:00

This is what you'll see when you stand at the balcony in my home.

This is what you'll see if you look through my camera's viewfinder (lens focus ring turned to *nearly* the shortest focal length)

I got this idea from some photography blog I found a long time ago. Get some black/dark coloured paper (to minimise internal reflections), and make something like this. Kinda like a cylinder which fits over your lens.

Make sure that the little fancy hole you cut into the black paper is smaller than the aperture of your lens. And I think this trick only works with lenses with apertures of f 1.8 and larger. (yes Jael, you can use your 50mm f1.8 portrait lens for this! :D )

Slide this over your lens, and you're good to go!

Aim your viewfinder at some distant lights,

and let the fun commence!

For the picture above, I actually pointed the camera at the same direction as seen in the first 2 pictures of this post. Fascinating, huh. :D

Swimming pool lights!

Enough of program mode. Decreasing the shutter speed and setting the aperture to f 1.4 in manual mode... The background magically darkens off.

I was so amused by this that I spent over half an hour at the balcony shooting. Nope, none of these pictures were photoshopped. And nope, I haven't grown up yet. :D

serendipity

2010-05-29T04:06:00.008+08:00

Reaching for Sunlight.

This photo was taken in a rush as I was trying to catch up with my parents in the streets of Tokyo. We passed by a shop which was selling LOTS of beautiful plants. Unfortunately, I didn't have much time to take a properly composed photo. The irony here is that looking at this photo makes me feel calm, even though it was taken hastily.

I wish I had set the camera to focus on the flowers in the centre... and I wish I had the chance to take the photo from a different angle. Or just include a full flower in the foreground. Sigh. Never mind.

Here's a cute picture I found while looking at the pictures in my external hard drive.

Two orange-coloured tulips in the middle of nowhere. :)

In case you're wondering... I'm posting this at 4.42am because I had a really long nap today from 4pm to 8.30pm. :P Right. I'm going back to sleep! :)

Why Smart People Do Stupid Things

2010-05-28T01:12:00.002+08:00

Even the humblest in the league of mentally superior beings can't help but accidentally admit that they're intelligent when they reminisce about stupid things they've done.

Although I feel like I tend to be overly talkative on msn, (especially on days like today, when my mind is blank. hehe) it felt good letting it all out to a good listener. And it was interesting to hear you share your experiences too.

A really important question you asked was, why do smart people do dumb things?

This article tells us why!
http://www.magazine.utoronto.ca/feature/why-people-are-irrational-kurt-kleiner/

This Kurt Kleiner guy says that intelligence and rationalism are not just different, they're separate entities. That's why many of us may have done stupid things in the name of love. Hehe.

According to him, a highly intelligent person can be irrational. But a very rational person may not have an above-average level of intelligence.

Do you think you're rational? Try this quiz to find out!

http://www.magazine.utoronto.ca/summer-2009/rationality-quiz/

This quiz made me realise that taking the scientific approach to things helps us to remain rational. Interestingly, I think I'm more rational than I really am. wow. Sadly, the scientific approach can't be applied to everything.

Forwards and Backwards - They mean something different.

2010-05-28T00:18:00.002+08:00

Reading a quote on this guy's blog (http://lohandbehold.wordpress.com/) intrigued me a little with the idea of changing the meaning of something when you reverse it. Allow me to digress a little...It's because I've been accidentally wearing my shorts the wrong way round for the past few days. I wonder why.

Maybe the quotes below might give you an idea of what I was trying to convey in the badly written paragraph above...

For starters...
There is nothing right in the left brain, and nothing left in the right brain.

An interlude...
The absence of evidence does not indicate the evidence of absence.

And the grand finale:
Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind. – Theodor Seuss Geisel (this quote is from that guy's blog.)

Playing with words is pretty fun. :D

are we running a losing race?

2010-05-25T23:44:00.006+08:00

11.45pm.

There are still 4 people shown to be online on my company email account.

That's pretty much because the edutrust assessor sent us an email at 5.30pm today. It contained a really long list of stuff we have to show him by 9.30am tomorrow. Attaining the certification may be of paramount importance, but sacrificing your health isn't worth it. At all.

I feel bad for not staying back to help. The list of stuff mentioned above doesn't contain anything within my scope of work, but still...

Sigh.

Then again, my common sense is nagging at me. This honestly feels like a last-ditch attempt. No matter how much it's going to hurt my colleagues to hear it... I'm saying it anyway since my close friends are pretty much the only ones who know of my blog - I don't think we can attain the provisional edutrust certification-the highest possible edutrust status the assessors claim to be able to award us with.

Well-written policies alone won't get us through. We've got to put them to use.

And we've got to open several new positions with decent benefits and remuneration; that'll probably start to attract more experienced and talented staff to our company. We don't have to do this because our current management team is inadequately skilled; we have to do this because there's an inadequate number of staff in our team.

We have our merciless verbal assailants to thank today, for we have probably never received a torrential rainfall of constructive criticism before.

There may seem to be a dead end ahead if we don't attain this certification. But we could retrace our steps. Did we go wrong somewhere back there?

We may come back wiser than before, and become capable enough to tread upon terrain where no man has ventured.

Hehe. I think I went overboard with that metaphor. Back to reality. This is an 18 (coming to 19) year-old, inexperienced, and temporary staff member typing on the keyboard right now. Who is going to take my rants seriously? :P Tomorrow, I shall still try my best to help out.
We've gotta finish the races we initiate.

yippee!

2010-05-24T20:47:00.002+08:00

Passed the driving final theory test in 10mins, because I didn't want to keep my mum waiting. :P (she couldn't find a place to park the car.) Now I have to practice driving like crazy until I don't make any more wide turns at high speeds... :D

I later found out that she parked the car in the Honda showroom nearby. She was talking to the salesman about the Honda Jazz, asking about the price... etc.

Biggest shock of my life, hahaha.

But then it occurred to me that she was only talking to him so that she could park her car at the Honda showroom. Hehe. :D

Lines and Limits

2010-05-22T23:21:00.007+08:00

You're on your way home from work, and you're doing it in style. You're decked out in the latest, trendiest clothes and accessories. A chic black top, skinny jeans, black sandals with a pretty floral embellishment, and the latest Marc Jacobs bag. You're youthful-looking, you have the lithe physique of a model, and you're over 1.8 metres tall.

You take a furtive glance at your watch.
6.40pm.
It's the rush hour.

You manage to carefully step into the crowded MRT carriage, making sure you don't bump into anyone. You stand facing the doors, and they quickly slid close with merciless precision, separating you from the disappointed commuters who didn't manage to enter the train. The train moves off, and you're left alone in the mind-numbing crowd, staring at your reflection in the dark reflective glass panel of the window.

Wait. Was that a dirty look from that guy standing behind you?
You quickly avoid his glance by looking away from the window.
But curiosity got the better of you. You look at the window again. Nearly everyone in the train is staring at you. Some of those faces were teeming with curiosity; they wanted to get a better view of you. Some faces were simply expressing their outright disgust at your appearance.

"This is normal,", you tell yourself. "I'm alright. I'm okay.".
----------------------------

The above was a scene I experienced on my way home from work today, while I was drowsy from the super strong antibiotics the doctor prescribed to me to cure my tonsillitis. (swallowing hurts like mad, but talking hurts less.)

Were you wondering why the girl went through such an unpleasant experience?
I'm sure she has to go through situations like that every single day, wherever she goes.
For some reason, I felt proud for her. She's really brave; she's got the guts and determination to live her life the way she wants to.

And that's not easy, because she's a transsexual.

I guess transsexuals like her pretty much live their lives like the most of us. The initial expression of curiosity at the masculine remnants of her facial features is understandable. But incessant staring, nudging, and commenting is unnecessary and plain rude. Sigh. I feel bad for her. More people could become more understanding of them if they just tried to imagine themselves as that girl.

I've made my point. Now it's time for some little problems of my own.

--------------------------------
"Mind over matter is the way to go, but it's difficult not to believe in emotions."
--------------------------------
How am I supposed to know if I've crossed the line?

For now, I know that you're a great person. Others-centred. Definitely more talented and hardworking than me. And 16cm taller, assuming I haven't grown any taller/undergone shrinking. :P

You're my friend. And vice versa. Not exactly a close friend, for now.

At least that's what my brain is telling me.

Why is the mastermind becoming a matchmaker?

I'm usually not strongly influenced by the opinions of others, but the mastermind is making me confused this time.

Maybe it's because I casually said that it has to be mutual for it to work out. If that quote which says that the truth only emerges past midnight holds true, then I think that we have a problem here. :P
With that message, did I just imply what my brain didn't mean to imply?
With that message, did I just imply what my emotions meant to imply?

A classic situation of "the brain says no, but the heart says yes". All thanks to the mastermind.
Maybe the mastermind just picked up little squeaks of emotions from me a long time ago. I didn't even know they existed; maybe I was hiding them from myself with facts. Now, he could simply be amplifying and broadcasting those little squeaks to you. Who knows what he'll be up to next? To avoid an awkward situation, I'll believe in logic for now. There is a mutual, unspoken agreement that this is strictly friendship.

It's confusing and distracting, as with all conundrums. With our absolute lack of expertise in this..... field, I don't think it's likely to work out in that way. After all, you do expect to lose contact with me once my contract ends, don't you? I'm expecting that too. Oh well. Let's allow fate to take over and ignore this issue.

And I'm only posting this here because I *think* you don't read blogs, do you? :p

Sigh. My throat hurts even when I laugh/yawn...

escalator

2010-05-21T16:22:00.001+08:00

At least we have Sundays.

2010-05-16T23:58:00.002+08:00

In Prison:
You spend your time in an 8 x 10 cell
At Work:
You spend your time in an 6 x 8 cubicle

In Prison:
You get three free meals a day
At Work:
You get one break for a meal you pay for

In Prison:
A guard locks and unlocks all doors for you
At Work:
You carry a security card, you unlock the doors

In Prison:
You get to watch TV and play games
At Work:
You get fired for watching TV and playing games

In Prison:
You get your own toilet
At Work:
You have to share

In Prison:
Family and friends are allowed to visit
At Work:
You're not allowed to speak to family or friends
(not true in my office. how about yours?)

In Prison:
Expenses are paid by taxpayers and work is not required
At Work:
You pay to go to work and you get to deduct expenses on your taxes to pay for prisoners

In Prison:
You look through the bars, hoping to get out
At Work:
You want to get out so you can go inside the bars

In Prison:
The wardens who are often called sadistic
At Work:
The wardens are called managers

Damn, I can't wait to enter NUS.

what does MLIA mean?

2010-05-14T10:16:00.001+08:00

http://mylifeisaverage.com/

Last night I was at a school sporting event where the ref made a terrible call. Amid all the boos and jeers i heard someone yell "May the fleas of a thousand camels infest the crotch of you, and may your arms be to short to scratch!" MLIA

Yesterday, I read a bumper sticker that said "buckle up; it makes it harder for the aliens to abduct you from your car". Needless to say this sticker will single handedly make the roads much safer. MLIA\

Today in my middle school while me and a friend were walking to class, a boy with a red shirt and blue overalls passed by us with his I Touch, which had a Super Mario Bros. soundboard app on it, walking to the theme song while making jump noises. We then proceeded to follow him straight to his homeroom, which he played the victory theme while cheering. I must make friends with this boy. MLIA

the new emergency number!

2010-05-11T00:04:00.002+08:00

Have you ever thought that 999 was too difficult to remember?
Well try this!

Watch the YouTube video!

It's from the British comedy, The IT Crowd.
Absolutely hilarious!
A pity that video embedding was disabled by the uploader.

I've lost count of how many times I've watched this, this jingle is curiously addictive.

0118 999 88199 9119 725.... 3...

That's...

oh one one eight
nine nine nine
eight eight one nine nine
nine one one nine
seven two five...
three...

Brit humour aside,
Thank you, Shi Jia, for the great dinner we had tonight! :D

the science of fashion.

2010-05-08T10:43:00.001+08:00

http://news.cnet.com/Geek-designer-wears-tech-well/2100-1041_3-6030370.html

Hitler rants about the Nikon D3X

2010-05-06T11:51:00.001+08:00

A video from 2008 that I just found. Late, yes, but still very entertaining. :D

Sometimes, geniuses feel embarassed too.

2010-05-03T14:35:00.002+08:00

I like this guy's style of writing! (and Stephen Hawking's honesty, too.)

Stephen Hawking: Time Travel Will Happen

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-20003949-71.html

some eye candy (or eye-cheesecake) for everyone!

2010-04-07T00:39:00.006+08:00

I'll be in Japan to catch the sakura season from tomorrow till the 21st, so it would be more considerate for me to (at least) leave a nice post (plus new pics on Flickr) behind while I go on a blogging hiatus.

Will take lots of pictures of the sakura in Japan! :D Gonna spend my monthly salary on a fast nikkor lens there. It may sound ridiculous, but hey, fast lenses are gonna be useful for lots of situations. Including my future money making scheme to recoup my investment. heh heh heh.

Thank you for the New York Cheesecake, Nina! Your bro is really a talented baker. :D

And Adrian... You better get well before I get back.

Hehe.

Looking foward to meet everyone again!

don't take life too seriously, and you'll feel happier!

2010-04-04T21:09:00.003+08:00

1st April 2010 was a memorable day. I've always enjoyed watching people play pranks on others. But with so much time to spare during the early office hours, malicious thoughts just kept brewing in my head.

Try this as a prank when you're free.

Write "Happy April Fools' Day!" on a post it note.

Paste the note over someone's optical mouse. (the part where there's this red light beaming at you)

The optical mouse will be fooled into thinking that the user of the mouse is not moving the mouse, since the laser and paper won't be moving relative to each other. hehe.

the list of work to complete in the office never ends.

2010-04-01T00:09:00.002+08:00

So why bother to work till the sun goes down?

You can always do it tomorrow. Or the day after. etc.

It's demoralising, but honestly, WORK NEVER ENDS!
(unless you tender your resignation, of course.)

I got lost on my way to Centrepoint today to meet my parents for dinner. Sigh. I have absolutely no sense of direction. Being on unfamiliar territory didn't help me find my way either. (I'm a stranger to Orchard)

While my dad was expressing his absolute incredulity at my lack of a congenital Global Positioning System over the phone, I looked upon the sky in utter exasperation.
And I saw a huge rainbow! (I'm serious!) Indeed, there's always a bright side to things... Most of the time. Yup. I still found my way to Centrepoint, although my parents are now extremely reluctant to let me study in a foreign country. Or even wander around in it.

Guess I won't be able to explore Japan by myself over the next 2 weeks. Hmm. I don't have the guts to either, since simple Japanese greetings won't help me to find my way back to safety. :P

The Nikkor 50mm f1.4 AF-S lens I want is going for $839.90 at the Nikon shop in Centrepoint, and around US$300 (!!) on B&H's site. And no, I didn't have S$10,000 notes hanging out tantalizingly from my pockets when I asked the salesman for the price. Wonder how much it costs in Japan.

Happy April Fools' Day, everyone! :D 3 is the new Pi!

o...kay?

2010-03-29T23:31:00.003+08:00

For some reason, the counter for this blog has leaped again. In a mere few hours.

coolSTYLE has a point there. Indeed, the Gemini in me just makes me get bored of many things really quickly. Whoever you are...

I'm guessing that coolSTYLE:
1) likes cynicism?
2) has a dark sense of humour, somewhere, somehow.
3) is someone I've talked to before in real life.
4) is a guy.

Welcome to my blog, and tell me if my conjectures are right! :D (and also who you are. hehe.)

ok, wild guesses aside, I really like what 巫启贤 (Wu Qi Xian) said about the lyrics to one of his songs. I forgot which. But he said,
先要有勇气，才能够许下承诺。
(you gotta have courage before you can make a promise. Something like that.)
That's how he remembers the lyrics to that song. Very meaningful, huh.

I guess I'm leaving Abraham alone.

2010-03-29T15:45:00.002+08:00

If this is coffee, please bring me some tea; but if this is tea, please bring me some coffee.
Abraham Lincoln

Here's another one.

Try to leave the Earth a better place than when you arrived.
Sidney Sheldon

multitasking

2010-03-28T22:52:00.003+08:00

I wish that I had two brains, or was born a savant.

Just so that I can watch my detective-themed dramas while reading a story book, or read two pages of 2 different books at the same time.

It's going to be double the fun.

Even if my brain were a computer processor, Moore's Law can't possibly be applicable to it. Or could it?

Nevermind. Let's just hope that reality is just a really persistent illusion.

something's holding me back.

2010-03-28T00:55:00.002+08:00

it's definitely not the contract.

With my parents nagging at me to leave this company (almost) every day, plus the crazy workload these days, it's quite tempting to.

I really want to try becoming a photographer. Even if I'll have to start with free projects.

I'll feel terrible for leaving so much work behind, though.

Maybe responsibility is keeping me from leaving. Hmmm.

I guess I'll stick to this job until it gets horribly unbearable. :)

Digressing... My blog's hit counter jumped by 46 hits in 3 days. I wonder who's reading this?

Impulse and Fun

2010-03-26T23:36:00.002+08:00

There are alot of things which I do on impulse. For fun. For the heck of it.

Why take life so seriously? Switch on the lights and brighten up!

Talking about lights, my eco-friendly colleague Annie just reminded us that it's Earth hour from 8-9pm tomorrow! :D Get in touch with your dark side during that hour.

Was watching Little Britain after I was done with the scholarship applications. Emily Howard the transvestite stole a dress and got interrogated in the police station by a really stern police officer...

Policeman: Name?
Emily Howard: (smiling flirtatiously, talking in a girly voice) Emily Howard.
Policeman: (skeptical look)
Emily Howard: (deep manly voice) oh all right. It's Eddie Howard.
Policeman: (writes down details in the form) Sex?
Emily Howard: (blushing) oh no, we've just met! (giggles like a girl) [LOL isn't Emily Howard super qian bian?]
Policeman: -_-..... Marital status?
Emily Howard: (girly voice) oh I've got plenty of suitors but...
Policeman: (skeptical look again)
Emily Howard: (manly voice) all right all right. I've got a wife and three kids.

LOL!

one good deed a day

2010-03-24T22:33:00.001+08:00

makes the world around you a much, much happier place. :D

Remember those anti-piracy videos you're *always* forced to watch before a movie?
Here's a parody of it! Super funny.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d82Lq2rVB_4

Are we really that dumb?

2010-03-22T17:34:00.002+08:00

Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.

- Bill Watterson

Nice one!!

the drawback of efficiency in the workplace

2010-03-19T22:03:00.003+08:00

If you work swiftly, your superior is gonna be a real happy person.

Your superior would (naturally) delegate more work to you.

But that's likely to make you one severely overworked person.

So, how efficient should you be to avoid burning out?

A big chunk of a pay increment would be nice, though. :D

the unspoken words

2010-03-18T22:38:00.002+08:00

how someone says goodbye to you seems to say a lot about how they really think of you.

as a friend or an acquaintance.

maybe I read too much into these stuff. :b

the joy of sharing!

2010-03-17T00:57:00.004+08:00

Understanding introverts: (we are not aloof! :D )

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/03/caring-for-your-introvert/2696/

How Six Songs Collide - by Norwegian Recycling

One of the best mash-ups I've heard in my life. You can download the song (and many other great mash-ups!) at http://norwegianrecycling.multiply.com/music. Soul of Fireflies is pretty interesting too.

Thanks for all the nice stuff you've shared with me! :D

a tough choice

2010-03-14T22:59:00.002+08:00

Is it better to love, or to be loved?

I think that love should be a two way street.

And I hope that none of my friends would ever have to make an important life decision while considering this question.

it all seems to even out.

2010-03-13T00:35:00.002+08:00

With all the cash that I've uncontrollably spent on technology, it is a weird feeling indeed to realise that technology can save me loads of money too. hmm...

I laughed my diaphragm into oblivion a while ago while chatting to constructionworker and alternating current on msn. I have no idea why I am easily amused (and that's a good thing, it makes life much more fun-filled!), but moments like those really make me feel like a kid again.

Without a care in the world. Ahhh.

dilemmas.

2010-03-11T23:31:00.003+08:00

imagine yourself as a shepherd, and you have a black sheep in your farm of white sheep.

the black sheep seems to be giving you many problems.

but you don't have any qualms about keeping the other white sheep.

you want to get rid of the black sheep.

do you:

1) tell all the other white sheep to stay away from the black sheep, or

2) tell the black sheep to go away?

recently, the shepherd chose the first option and stuck to it. And sometimes, we do pity the black sheep. Sigh.

Mummy bought a bottle of silver nail polish for me today. I intended to paint it over the damaged areas on the reflector panel of my crumpler bag. (I decided on this after a few failed attempts with a $4 silver fabric pen. #$%^$#%!!!)

But it turned out to be a translucent nail polish.

To save this new resource from wastage, the white sheep decided to paint her nails silver. Heh heh. The last time I coloured my nails was when I was five?? :D

Had a great start to my day in the office today. Constructionworker welcomed me back with a joke. (or rather, a re-enactment of an earlier conversation.)

alternating current: (looking at the policy template) Who's lily?

constructionworker : Oh, the trainer.

alternating current: What? The traitor?

:D HILARIOUS!!!

By the way, the IT fair is on right now in Suntec Convention Hall. I checked the Nikon booth out this afternoon, only to find out that they don't sell any lenses at the fair. The salesman told me to go to either lucky plaza or the Fuji Xerox Tower to purchase lenses directly from Nikon. Hmm. Isn't it weird that everyone is so concerned with camera bodies? I want to check out the price of a Nikkor 50mm f1.4D lens. So do give me an sms if you see this lens around. Thanks! :D

having fun with the kit lens.

2010-03-11T01:24:00.009+08:00

Shijia Outing No.2: Aston's Express in Bedok.

Food for thought...

and for drooling.

They offer pretty good food for under $10 per person. Not bad at all. :D

Yep, it's the IR. (Streaks of light! Yay!)

Taken at an area outside the Singapore Flyer after my family's reunion dinner this year.

Light Painting: my first try at this! It's quite fun.

Just find a light source and a very dark room.

Increase your shutter speed... up to a couple of seconds.

Increase the f-number to deepen the depth of field. Set the camera to manual focus/disable auto-focus. (the camera has trouble focusing on stuff in the dark)

Then, press the shutter release button.

Swish your light source in front of your camera until you hear the mirror in the camera slap down. And ta dahh! You get something like this. For this picture, I used the iPhone menu as the light source... Which explains the presence of the numerous little colourful squares!

Unfortunately, (?) you can see the fan in my room on the left side of this picture. :P So remember to point your camera towards an empty wall if you don't want stuff other than the light to be in the picture!

ice lemon tea

happy days: hippo and the sesame street guy.

Precious Moments: Friends write from the start.

nikon? Hmmm.

macro: a little bee on my mum's sunflower.

You... are... The Only Exception.

(just heard that Paramore song on MTV. Pun intended.)

Clearly, this was not taken with the D90.

I couldn't resist taking a picture of Adrian's new workstation on Tuesday. :D

(taken with my iPhone. Why are there vertical streaks in the picture? It may be due to the flickering fluorescent lights in my office. )

Going for the National Infocomm Scholarship talk tomorrow. And I'm going to have lots of work to chiong in the office tomorrow, too. I'm kinda too lazy to write essays for scholarship applications after I come back from work. Sigh. Must press on.

NUS open house on Sunday.

Learning to bake a shepherd's pie at Nina's house on Sunday too. :D Thank you Nina!

And yup. I just uploaded new pictures on flickr.

ok this is very late but.....

2010-02-24T09:26:00.002+08:00

Just posted our previous shijia outing pics on flickr.

In case you don't remember the URL... (which is most probably the case!)

It's
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pinkphoton/

Didn't manage to post all the pics we took, because I'm a lazy scrooge who won't pay US$20 for a pro account, and I haven't optimised the file sizes of the pics. Heh heh heh.

And I apologise for any weird yellowish/grayish colour casts in the pics. Haven't got the time to photoshop them all yet. :|

Looking foward to our gathering this Sunday? :D
and the NTU talk this Saturday! :D

thinking when you don't want to.

2010-02-17T10:13:00.002+08:00

Paiseh ah. Haven't been updating due to my new job. :P

As the days go by, I've been getting weirder and more horrifying nightmares every night.

From dreaming of my parent's petrified faces when they see my A level results to dreams of random people.

Uncertainty is worrying. And driving me crazy.

Must remember dad's words. "Whatever it is, you must live with it... Aiya anyway A levels not very important one la. Just study what you like."

I'm hoping it's NUS for me, I have nothing against NTU except that it's a 2+++hour public transport journey from my home!

I thought that walking/jogging for 1 hour at the gym every day could make me sleep better, but nooooo... Physical exhaustion doesn't eliminate weird dreams.

CNY was generally boring, as usual. But I realised that I like to see kids playing happily. :D Or kids *beaming* at the mention of pizza for lunch. Super cute! I miss the innocence we all once had. Don't you? The times when we never understood or heard of politics.

Didn't take many pics during CNY. My pot of flowers got thrown away, though, because it was completely infested with aphids. Haiyar. 1 month of gardening effort!

For some reason, many things have fallen nicely into place so far. I can only hope that this sense of order (probably imposed upon my life by an extremely kind higher being, thank you! :D) will persist.

I mean, a national infocomm scholarship with 1 year at Carnegie Mellon doing game design (whoohooooo!!!) would be fantastic! Plus 3 years at NUS doing electrical and electronics engineering. Heh heh.

Talking about game design... I finally got to setting up my Xbox in my room yesterday, so Shijia can have loads of fun this Sunday.

We must enjoy our lives while we can! :D

Mum and Dad are right. The workplace IS full of idiots.

2010-01-20T12:52:00.004+08:00

"All truth passes through three stages:
first, it is ridiculed;
next it is violently attacked;
finally, it is held to be self-evident."
- Schopenhauer

So I may have only spent two days in this company,

but there are, indeed, many inefficient operating procedures...

and dangerous ones, too.

I pointed them out to the inexperienced, unreceptive trainer. She didn't listen. She didn't care for the welfare of the company either. She simply puts on a fake front, pretending to be concerned for customers, and then grumbling about them afterwards.

Can we call that honesty? The world may be a stage, but feigning concern an assault to your integrity.

Can't stand being mentored by morons...

Anyway, I won't be seeing this moron ever again. You thought that all I did was irritate you with a cornucopia of questions. :) I'm 18, and I'm inexperienced at work. But I'm pretty good at surreptitiously manipulating and sabotaging my enemies without them even realising it. You had a low threshold, I saw through your vulnerabilities easily.

(but seriously, I broke down out of frustration with your nonsense. Worst person I've ever dealt with, man. Gotta learn to control my temper better.)

You've offended the wrong person. So watch out for your rice bowl. Moron!

I'm moving on to better things.

You, remember to stay single!

Vacation pics!

2010-01-12T22:28:00.004+08:00

Love my camera... :)

Now for the less mushy stuff.

This pic above is of a very luxurious-looking golf course at Monterey Bay (for the rich!) which I visited during my trip to the US in December. Love the tree! And the lake in the background! :D Don't think I can afford a golf membership there, though. hehe.

This was taken when we were just about to leave the Grand Canyon. (Ironically, the nicer pics I took there weren't of the Grand Canyon itself...) The skies there were cloudless. And the sunset was so beautiful. Sniff...

Ok these pics I've uploaded here are really taking up loads of space, so I've uploaded the rest on Flickr!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pinkphoton/

Hope you enjoyed the photos! :D

These are the days...

2010-01-11T14:17:00.001+08:00

When I wish that I was born a guy.

Sigh. I hate cramps.

Will be updating when my cramps are gone for good. :D

By Request!

2010-01-10T09:22:00.004+08:00

First of all, sorry for not updating for nearly a month. Lazy, lah. :P

In case you're wondering how I'm spending most of my time... Well, I've rented the first season of The Mentalist ( :D yay!) and I've enjoyed almost every minute of it! Patrick Jane is the reincarnation of Sherlock Holmes, in my opinion. :P

Other than lazing around with my Patapon 2 PSP game and watching DVDs, my long period of mental shutdown also includes running on the treadmill once a week and following my mum out to do some shopping. And of course, cable TV! :D

Really, I'm just waiting for some job offers/interviews to roll in now.

By the way, here are some pics from our latest shijia dinner! There are 60 pics in total, and I think I sent about 5 pics to each of you. But the emails to Jael and Julia bounced back. :( I must have made your mailboxes explode. Sorry... :(

Like Jael said, we should set up a blog to post shijia pics only. Hehe :)

I did the Jacob.

2009-12-14T15:49:00.007+08:00

Watched The Pink Panther 2 movie on TV last night with my dad. Alot more hilarious than I expected!

Aishwarya Rai: Excuse me, may I disturb you?

Inspector Cruzo (i.e. Steve Martin, looking stunned by the beauty): Oh yes! Please disturb me.

HAHA!

Also went to watch New Moon with Bahiah and Nina last Thursday. It wasn't a great movie... but the Jacob parts really made it worth our $7.50. Plus I haven't met the both of you in a very long time... :( Jacob's scenes were mostly hilarious, except for the parts when he was fighting with Edward over Bella. :O

Remember how much better Jacob looked after he cut his hair short in the movie?

Yesterday, I did the Jacob too. :D

Before: The unkempt hair of Jacob. Wasn't cut at all since October. GAH!

After: Transformation to a werewolf. It's in my genes.

(Ok, there are no vampires and werewolves in this world. )

I like my new hair! It's great for sloths like me; it doesn't require combing in the morning. :P

Now for some pictures I've shot over the weeks. I LOVE MY D90! And photoshop too. :D

Uploading more pics after a game of Sushido. :D

Theories don't always apply in our lives.

2009-11-22T12:40:00.003+08:00

Just flipped through this week's papers, and discovered that Nikon is still selling the D90 kit with the 18-105mm lens (and a few other free gifts which I don't need, other than the rather nice 8gb card... hehe.) at $1988.
(Audiohouse seems to be offering more attractive free gifts at that price, though.)

STILL!
NOOOOOOOO!!!
WHY???

I thought change made the world go round.

Nikon just stopped my world from revolving for a millisecond. :P

That almost made me fly off tangentially.
(don't forget your circular motion, physics student.)

I thought the US dollar just depreciated against the Sing dollar. Why aren't our US imports cheaper? Why? Why is this so reminiscent of econs? :O
(it's ok if you forgot the exchange rate policies, though.)

8 more days, 1 week and a day has never felt like eternity.

On an even sadder note, my dad brought me into a Sony shop yesterday afternoon, and we were stunned by the prices (and arm-muscle-unfriendly sizes) of the alpha lenses. Especially those macro/wide angles I've been eyeing. Doubt the Nikkor ones would differ much from the alphas, then. Sigh. Rich man's hobby, huh. Guess I'll have to work hard for them! :)

On a happier note, my dad's new iphone casing matches mine. :D Mine's metallic pink; his is a very shiny silver. My mum's iphone now has a mirror-like screen protector! :D :D :D

And on an even happier note, Jael's new blog is now open! With 37 new captivating pictures of her cousin's wedding yesterday in her first post, you'll be shocked to know that she took them all with her sony ericsson phone. :) No kidding.

Hai. I'm pretty much in holiday/gaming/leisure reading mode already. Shall load my Michael Buble CD into my phone, and revise chemistry again.

Our much deserved break has never been so tantalizingly near.

I just hope that my A level results will be good enough to allow me to enter the electrical/electronics engineering course at NUS. I'll be delighted, really. :D

Be still, my beating geek heart.

2009-11-22T09:24:00.003+08:00

This is quite funny! =D
Getting my D90 on 30th Nov, after the physics MCQ paper which marks the commencement of freedom!

funny

2009-10-27T23:31:00.001+08:00

"To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering, one must not love. But then, one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be happy, one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness."

by Woody Allen

now that's interesting.

2009-10-27T23:20:00.000+08:00

Many quantum physicists believe your angry vibration can be felt in a larger universal energy field—thereby attracting negative circumstances. A well-known quantum physics expert, Lynne McTaggert, wrote about a study she witnessed where a happy person sent out loving energetic thoughts to an angry person, which then successfully calmed this angry person's temper.

from Oprah's website. :D cool huh.

Let's do this!

2009-10-25T12:53:00.012+08:00

ARE YOU READY TO ROCK???!

15 days to our first A level paper! YAY!

Despite having failed prelim math (S, damn sad), and crying over it (and physics, who else but me could have made so many careless mistakes in paper 3?) for 2 days a loongg time ago, I've slogged my guts out over the revision packages after prelims, and I'M READY TO ROCK!!! :D

I'm only blogging today because I just finished the NJC 09 physics prelim paper this morning. Yay! I fell asleep, sprawled unglamourously on my bed at 1am last night, just as I had 1 more question left to finish paper 3. My dad said he came in at 3am to find me, this dead log, heavily asleep on the bed, with study lamp in my room turned on. hahaha :D He nearly scolded me for studying late again. For some reason, the hc teddy gives me motivation to study. We got it on graduation night from Mr How, under the nerve-wrecking glare of the stagelights, in front of the whole of the Athena faculty. Stage fright!

We all slogged for 2 years in this JC for you, bearbear. You better have some kind of supernatural powers which can increase our intelligence. :D

It has soft, curly fur, and dons the hwachong PE attire, minus the black school shorts with elastic bands of unusually high spring constants. Yes, it's made of the same uncomfortable dryfit material which we hate... But at least it keeps bearbear warm in case its homeostasis system breaks down. :)
Hey... stop trying to hug your computer screen!

Goodness, I haven't visited my blog since... I forgot. I was really happy to see Mrs Foo's comment on my September post! Oh man... Mrs Foo. You made the comment on 2nd October and I just saw it today. Paiseh. >.<>

Hello Mrs Foo! :D I miss you! I'll come back to visit TKGS after my A levels, hope you'll still be in school when I'm back, haha. :) Did you find my blog via Mr Yong's blog? hehe. :P

So, after all, it's byebye to hc diploma, no thanks to my math and physics. And my horrible GP. (sigh) After all the effort I put in for prelims, and all the time which has passed, I'm over the initial period of severe disappointment. :D

Miss Lim (GP tuition teacher) returned us our most recent compre yesterday, and I was also pleasantly surprised to see that I got 32/50. 6/8 for AQ. 11/15 for language. Seriously, I have NEVER scored >28 for a compre, >5 for an AQ, and >8 for language since I came to jc. Heehee. My English isn't THAT bad after all lor. Recently Jen and Shu Hui got 5 for their AQ, if I recall correctly! Seeing the fruits of your labour is really encouraging! Although Weilun meant to be sarcastic when he said "wah, you so lucky" in response to Ms Lim when she told him that I first met her 4 years back on a Europe trip, he has truly spoken words of wisdom. hahaha :P hc's method of teaching GP simply doesn't work for me. Sigh.

Nevermind, on to happier things, like graduation night photos! :) Not that I like camwhoring, but this is the last chance this year to catch some photos with my friends. :(

Mr Remedios, thank you for your patience, tic-tacs, colourful spring, brute force/iteration method for radioactive decay, and of course, the SuperStuds. (in other words, supervised study sessions)

Poon, who covered his head with a black bag after shouting HWACHONGGGG really loudly after we sang the school song. Go Poon! We love your antics. :D

Going clockwise, it's Shu Hui, Jen, Me, Lina. With photobombers Wilson and Nic Tan at the back, and Kennsiang's peace sign. Thanks Kennsiang, I think the world has enough terrorists, we don't need any more photobombers.

Shu Hui pointing at Wayne. Wayne goes "Noooo dun take photo of me!".

Shuhui and a suicidal Wayne. Nooo Shuhui don't shoot!

Jen and Shuhui have been studying with me all this while, so here's a little tribute to them.

(Jen I don't have a photo with you :( )

Shuhui is against photobombers.

And now for people from 08S6C to look out for in the headlines in 10-20 years. Hmmm. I smell talent hunters.

Chuan Khim.

Something has happened!

Xinyi's IQ increases by 10!

Talking about living in the moment...

Jun Lin.

Something has happened!

Xinyi's IQ has increased by 10!

And... my dear BBI/Centad/SSEF groupmate!

(pity Lu Theng is in Artemis... could've gotten a group photo.)

Without you, we wouldn't have had all those really good marketing strategies.

Presenting the future psychologist/successful businesswoman,

Jiang Ying! Trying to be funny arh. :)

If you're a 4 H2 PCME student like the overworked me, it's 36 days to the END of the A levels! You've only got to slog for another month! :D

On a bleaker note, the price of a Nikon D90 with a 18-105mm kit lens is STILL $1988 after nearly 3 months. Cheap DSLR, sadly, still remains an oxymoron. Guess I'll have to make do with that price. When I buy it, the first person I'll take a photo with is Nina! Because we're both not the camwhoring kind, we haven't taken a photo together yet!!! hahaha!!! >_<

I wonder if entering the NUS course for electrical and electronics engineering will be the right choice for me...? Mmmmph. Too complex an issue for my feeble and immature 18 year old brain. What's all the talk about this course being easy to get in, and difficult to score in? I just want to be in the team of techies creating the next coolest invention, and be happy while I'm at it.

A simple dream which seems so difficult to achieve.

Okie. In the meantime, I have to pia the chemistry prelim papers for tomorrow. The +20 intelligence I received on grad day is still coursing through my neural network. Ah.

If you feel stressed, remember that gorging yourself is NOT the right thing to do.

Even if you look cute while doing it.

36 days to freedom! Persevere. :D

time to catch your breath

2009-09-19T12:43:00.004+08:00

Love Story meets Viva La Vida

The title may sound weird, but the music doesn't. :D

Also, some eyecandy for you!

YES! They're all cupcakes!! :D

Jiayou everyone! One week and 2 more days to go. :) We'll get through this soon.

Rethinking my life

2009-09-03T12:33:00.002+08:00

It's odd that I don't feel very stressed out now, even though the prelims start tomorrow.
Yikes!

In fact, I felt much much much more stressed a few weeks back. Weird huh.
Suddenly, I lost my hopes of going overseas to pursue a degree in engineering. Just can't imagine how badly I'd fare at being independent. And I feel too lazy to apply for overseas unis. In fact, now I kinda don't care if I can't get the hc diploma. I'd be happy to enter NUS. :)
Is this laziness??

The past few days haven't been extremely productive. (only start revising each day from 1pm to 7pm. Then it's TV all the way until 12mn.)Wonder if the last minute chiong syndrome in me will ever surface. :/

Yesterday night, I had a terrible nightmare. I downloaded some RPG game from the Apple appstore, only to discover later that it was a trojan in disguise. It took over the entire OS of my iPhone and wiped out all my data. It took me a long while to get over the panic, and finally attempt to delete the app from my phone. Miraculously, the simple solution worked. And I woke up. PHEW! Definitely one of the worst dreams I've had. (I rarely dream.)

Oh yes... I am currently extremely sick of studying. SIGH.
Thankfully, we only have 3 more months to go.
And all I can think of is the day when we finish our A levels.
After that, I can:

-release 1000 mealworms in the Principal's office.
(just kidding)

-Meet up with Shijia and friends! :D
-eat at holy grill again
-Visit TKGS teachers
-bake for friends

-Buy a DSLR
-Learn driving (very important :D )
-jog for an hour every day. I think I'm becoming a mobile lump of lard; sitting at home all day mugging.
-Learn to read Japanese

-finish knitting scarves for my family
-US trip! Yay! My mum's friend and her daughter are going on the same trip too. :D

-finish reading the quantum and the lotus.
-finish reading a brief history of time
-finish reading the 3rd eragon trilogy. (embarassing, I know.)

Ah. I feel more motivated to mug now. :D
Keep the holidays in mind, everybody!
And good luck for the prelims!

Movie outing!

2009-08-22T00:21:00.005+08:00

Had a very fun movie outing with Nina today at Century Square. After countless days of toiling our brains away in school, the free periods of our frenetic timetables finally coincided. :D

We watched the 5pm Up movie after lunch at Tampines One. Most of the food there is pretty expensive though.

Watching it in 2-D (not 3D, it makes us dizzy) may have removed the physical element of depth from the movie, but some of the scenes and quotes have definitely struck a deep chord within us.

I remember the rotund boy scout talking about his dad, and how they spent their free time counting how many blue or red cars they spotted on the road. The old man looked disgruntled as he reluctantly listened to the little boy's incessant boring chatter; but his heart immediately softened when the boy mused that "it's the boring stuff that you'll remember.".

Thinking back, I realised that the little boy is right. Whenever memories of TKGS flood my mind, the ones which I remember most vividly are the days when we returned to the school library during the study break to mug for the O levels. Those were the days when I was, oddly, happy amidst all the stress which the impending O levels was imposing upon us.

Maybe it was because we had superb teachers like Ms Yeo, Mrs Chan, Ms Tee, Mrs Pang, and Mrs Foo, Mr Peh, and Mrs Irene Tan who helped us to understand our work well. Maybe the O levels are way easier than the A levels. (definitely!)

Maybe it was how we came together, helping each other solve crazy questions. Maybe it was how we challenged each other to the Impossible Quiz, or checked out interesting books like "Mad About Physics" in the TKGS library when we got bored of studying.

I'm sure I bored you as much as the little boy bored the old man, but these are the stuff I'll remember for life.

Ah. I miss those blissful days in tkgs.

I received the results of the PSC psychometric assessment today, and I was stunned by its accuracy. (okay, except for jen's twin's report which astonishingly said that he's 'cool' and 'humble'. Once you tell others how humble you are, you lose your humility!) I was never an extrovert, but many incidences which I've witnessed in JC have made me more introverted. I have shut nearly all my doors of trust to others, and I silently think about agendas people around me may be having. And I've learnt to only fully trust and confide in true friends.

On a lighter note, the report also said that I am unable to work methodically (hehe), and that I can't stand boring work. My thoughts are also "somewhat disorganized". The joke of the year is the part where it said, "you are generally more easygoing than most people are when facing delays in assignments". hee... ;)

Back then, strong bonds of friendship kept us going.
Right now, some of these bonds may have faded;
but some remain, and have become stronger than before.

That will keep us advancing in this crazy race.

3 months is all we need to get through to reach our goal of freedom.
Don't give up, my friends! :D

So THAT'S how you kill gummy bears...

2009-07-28T18:50:00.001+08:00

the end of our BBI presentation, but only the start to Ambi's journey into the world.

2009-07-11T15:44:00.009+08:00

I'm not boasting here... but my group has definitely done extremely well for BBI. From our pitch to the way we answered the questions which were unforgivingly shot at us... We were very sure that we put in our very best and gave it our all on the 10th of July. Thank you to Mrs Tan and Mr Tan for their praises; we are very happy that our effort has been recognised.

We may not have entered the grand finals, although we were pretty confident of it yesterday. But oh well. Things happen. We felt like we let Mr Terry Goh down. We promised him that we would win. I may not have cried yesterday, but I cried quietly for a while when I reached home and told my parents about BBI. In fact, my eyes well up whenever I think of the judging results on Friday, as I am now. It really hurts to know that you have done your best, that there are many people who believe in your product and team, that you actually have a good chance of presenting your business plan to the J1 cohort.

Our team joined Best Business Idea for a different reason. We wanted to make Ambi known to the whole school.

You can call winning BBI a by product of the competition, because the transformation we have undergone is priceless. From the introverted people Mr Tan once saw... to confident presenters on Friday. (hehe now I'm not going to talk like I'm pitching, though.) But winning, or at least qualifying for the Grand Finals, would have been the ultimate way for us to know that our efforts have been recognised.

They should have told us earlier that the judges were looking for products which could earn profits quickly (for Singapore)... The name of the competition has been made a misnomer ever since the judges gave their summative comments.

Nevermind... Lesson learnt: If you want to win, then before joining a serious competition like BBI which requires a hell lot of hard work over a long period of time, ascertain the background info of the judges, and also be very sure of the judging criteria.

Hehe. Hope you read that, juniors!

We were also quite depressed when we heard that the judges barely read our business plan. That was the product of months of hard work... now gone to waste.

Lesson Learnt: If you ever become a superior, take the effort to read the proposals your subordinates have submitted to you. Show your appreciation for their effort; everyone cheers up when they know that their efforts have been recognised.

You once told me that after years of training and injuries, there's the desire to end it well; but one wrong step shatters it all. For us, those were sleepless nights, numerous painful scoldings from our parents, endless editing of our report and powerpoint, and numerous speech practices. We, too, wanted to end it well. But we don't know what shattered it all. Did we take a wrong step? Or did the judges make the wrong decisions? I'd like to believe in the latter (hehe Mr Goh...), but not knowing the exact cause of our predicament hurts the most. We want to improve, but if you can't tell us how to, I'd resolve to believing that you guys weren't a credible bunch.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Hahaha ok I shall put an end to BBI; to all that remorse, regret, and sadness. Let's just say that the people we have met, how we improved as a group; and also as individuals, are just priceless.

(The skills we have acquired will allow us to get jobs which pay so well that we can afford to visit the Silicon Valley 10 times a year. :D Skills are priceless!)

hehe I always have this feeling that I'll be really rich in the future. :) muahahahahahaa... Or have I confused my feelings with my daydreaming?

----------------------------------------------------------------------
YES! On to happier things!

Ambi Inc. returned Ambi to the NUS SRL after BBI, and guess what we saw...

YES!!! IT'S THE S$6000 SOFT TOY, Paro from Japan!

AHHHH SO CUTE RIGHT!!! Bet you jumped out of your chair to get a closer look. We couldn't contain our excitement either.

A robotic seal, it's built to comfort/calm the elderly and children. Some homes for the elderly in Singapore are using Paro, for your info. :D

Doesn't it have such long eyelashes? Haha :D It purrs a bit when you touch its whiskers. (or whatever you call that) I forgot how many touch sensors it contains; but there sure are a LOT of them in there. And they're really responsive. Paro responds to you regardless of where you touch it.

The sound localization is just OMG!!! I tried snapping about 1 metre away, and Paro turned to me! IT TURNED TO ME!!! IMMEDIATELY!!! The microphones are cleverly hidden in its nostrils. This piece of technology is DEFINITELY worth the 6k. The lab will be using it for psychology tests on the elderly and children.

You may be wondering about the pink pacifier. It's a stroke of genius... Well. It's a charger! Plug the pacifier into Paro's mouth, link the other end of the pacifier to the mains, and paro starts charging! Paro actually sleeps (with its eyes closed!) while charging, and wakes up when you provoke it. It even bats its luscious eyelashes gracefully before groggily waking up. How cute is that! :D Like a little baby.

everybody say: AWHHHH............

Yup, we later headed to this shopping mall in Boon Lay interchange to buy gifts for our teachers and mentors. And also to buy Japanese schoolbags which we have been eyeing on since June. :D Didn't manage to haggle much of the price off, though. Yay now we have the same schoolbag with different designs. :D Plus, we now look more studious with double strap backpacks. We're well on our way to mugging sessions and straight As!

Oh. I was considering whether to join the NUS Start-Up business competition next year. The grand prize is 10k! But you must have a working model of the product. Which translates into many hours in the SRL after the A levels..... We're not giving up on Ambi.

ooh, interesting

2009-06-29T22:42:00.002+08:00

This is so weird that I have to blog about it right now.

I just synced Michael Jackson's 'Black or White' and Linkin Park's 'New Divide' into my iPhone.

When I turned on the radio, the Muttons were playing their hilarious 'complete my mutton' game. They then played 'Black or White'

And then, they played 'New Divide'.

hehe back to the economic growth notes. :D

da jia jia you!

what went wrong?

2009-06-26T00:46:00.002+08:00

The camera's stare is fiercer than that of the audience.
At least for me. :P

xinyi finds me scary. BOOOOOO!

ok, maaaybe she prefers DSLRs and considers me, a technological fossil, as a highly uncouth contraption. sigh.....

Yes, I practised my pitch for 4 hours. But I screwed up my BBI 1minute pitch today during video taking. (Mrs Tan: you need to practise more. Not enough zeal.) SIGH. I'm not a drama mama, I'm one of ambi's mama. Sorry Jiang Ying and Lu Theng. If we don't get into the grand finals, it's my fault. Hai. But thank you for being so understanding all the time. :) The both of you are some of the BEST people I've worked with. I love my centad group so much that I want to start a fanclub for it. :D Don't worry, I will improve on my pitching. Silicon Valley. (stares dreamily into the distance)

And thanks for the chocs Jeannie! Haha they really brightened up my day.

Mum was so nice, she offered to help me video my pitching on a camera and offered me tips, such as "Believe you are Obama when you're pitching!". Nod nod. I'll try to! :D

Sigh, today was a bad day. Maybe lao tian ye wants me to pay back for the birthday luck he gave me 2 weeks ago. It's wearing out. Or maybe I'm starting to break under pressure.

I woke up today to find my mouth ulcer not hurting. (whee!) My morning began with a hearty breakfast, and promptly ended with a debilitating stomachache. Gah!

Took a cab to NUS (stomachache emergency delayed me) which cost $17. Ouch!

Spent some time at the new SRL. Nice place! Panda-eyed Hewei grants his mentees permission to transport their brainchild, Ambi, to HCI. Mentees oblige to bringing Ambi back to NUS at first, but later bargain with their mentor after a second thought. Mentee Chong claimed that Mentor Lim allegedly blushed during the bargaining event. Only the accused would know why. Mentee Lim remains clueless as usual. Hee!

(oh! we saw hewei without his specs for a while today. his specs seem to make his eyes look smaller. hmm. :/ is he wearing inverted magnifying glasses? )

Mentee Chong lugs along the blazers and bags, while Mentee Lim tries to handle the brainchild with care on their way to the bus stop. They later board the NUS internal bus and have an entertaining chat about guys, until Mentee Chong claims that she hates guys-who don't reply to SMSes they're supposed to reply to. Mentee Lim nods fervently in agreement, until she notices a lone male student sitting next to her (and in front of Mentee Chong) quietly laughing to himself. Mentee Chong's face turns pale for a moment, and she covers her mouth in shock. Both mentees subsequently became entangled in a longgggg moment of mirth. Ah, the good times we've had in NUS.

Ok, Mentee Lim will now stop writing in 3rd person and get to the point.

.

There, a point!

(waits for laughter, and hears none.)

.....Right! The point is that my arms and my left lower back are aching like hell. Sob. I can't even tolerate physical activities like that. Sob. Or is Ambi really that heavy? Hope Lu theng isn't experiencing aches. I think I won't be able to fit into my long-sleeved tops anymore, because my arm muscles are getting huge. Awh man. Is it possible to reduce those muscles? Ok I should stop talking about my insecurities. Buy me a lock!

Anyway, today... I felt like I have never done anything properly all my life, and I can't see anything through to completion. That feeling of despair is indescribably horrible for perfectionists. I didn't pitch well, I haven't started on chem revision, and I'm not done with my math revision. Damn, I didn't set my priorities right. My time management is... uhhh, what's time?

Dad was slightly angry at me for not opening the door quickly when he came home today; I was stoning in front of the TV, thinking about my pathetic state, and completely oblivious to the formidable loads of bags in his 48-year old arms. It would've been a hilarious incident on a normal day, but today, it made me feel absolutely worthless to society, and I started crying midway through my dinner. Why do I even exist? Hey, I'm of no use to anyone. I'm a letdown.

I tried to hold it back at first, but my tears decided to obey gravity, and they all poured out. Dad got pissed when my mum put the blame on him. Heh.

I attempted to practice more Poisson distribution questions, but my mind was a blur. Chatting to Edha online really made me feel better. Sometimes you need a good friend (who is online) to share everything with. It's difficult to talk when you're all choked up in tears and suffocating in stress. A problem shared is a problem halved, indeed.

In my entire academic life, in my ostensibly nerdy (please look at me) existence, I have never cried so many times in one year, because I don't cry easily. JC2 broke the record; give me a trophy for it! Sometimes I wonder why I was so eager to enter hwachong ever since I was a pimply sec1. But heck, it has been a tumultuous time in JC, and it's going to be over soon, for good riddance. And... centad and BBI have made it-dare I say?-the best experience I've ever had.

Still miss tkgs, though. Mrs Chan... my favourite chem teacher. Ms Yeo and Mrs Pang, the dedicated cute masters of math. Ms Tee and Mr Yong, for their highly entertaining physics classes. My sec 4 SS teacher. And our favourite tkgs teacher of all: Mdm Seah! :D

Edha, thanks for this video! It instantly ended my 2 hour session of crying.
It's amazing. Watch it to believe it.

oooh Benny Lava...

A little old Bollywood did the trick. Way to go Edha. Good luck for your Friday event. ;) Chem engineering and Electrical/Electronics Engineering results in harmonic resonance. Trust your instincts. :)
I'm back on my track to MIT! I mean doing ok for BT2. (not very confident, hehe)
That is, after I get some sleep tonight. Don't worry Mentor Lim. Ambi isn't giving me any nightmares.

Tomorrow will be a better day.

Think it, and you will be it.

and that's why I love Japan TV

2009-06-25T01:13:00.000+08:00

whee! I'm legal! Uhh. So I can't do illegal stuff?

2009-06-08T00:10:00.005+08:00

Thank you to...

Nina for your lunch invitation today. hehe.

Jen for sending me your sms at 11.04pm. hahaha...

Jael and Shu Hui for sending their birthday melodies over at 12 midnight exactly. So qiao ah. You both sent the birthday song to me at the same time!

Chun Ling for your heartwarming sms... Oh, the heartburn!

Chuan Khim for his birthday wishes over msn.

(yep, in chronological order again! Don't you just love it?)
(on a sidenote, I'm really doubtful about the MIT thing. I'm not really up to it...)

Jael, don't worry about not being the first to sing the birthday song to me k! Sometimes life whizzes by at the speed of light, and we have to take into account the effects of time dilation.

Man... what am I talking about?

What do I want for my birthday? A sony alpha 700 dslr.
But I've decided to work after the A levels to finance the astronomical expenses of my newfound interest.
AIM: Earn 2000 bucks in 2 months, spend a maximum of $1500 on the fancy encapsulated techno-surrounded pentaprism and its peripherals! Save the other $500.

What do I really want for my birthday?
My family and friends... You know who you are. :D
All of you are worth so much to me that if I ever decided to sell you all off for money, it'd cause a really bad inflation, when consumption starts to increase, and AD increases, and the AD curve shifts right, bla bla bla econs bla bla you get the idea.

My parents bought a cake today too. awh. >_<

To many, I look like a secondary school child.
But you all definitely made me feel like an 18 year old today.

Thank you - for being part of my life.

**Update**
Thank you Shu Hui for your ultra cute birthday card! :D

interlude

2009-06-01T22:01:00.003+08:00

Originally wanted to continue with my previous grandmother story post about what happened at Robopreneur on Friday... But well, I'm not that old yet. I shall continue with that post on another day. :P

stoned/played taptap revenge 2 (online!) for the whole day today.

Before you scold me for slacking, I just want to say that I have still been very hardworking... at the cellular level. (8km on exercise bike! :D )

Ahh. Jokes aside, I felt like a lousy friend on Sunday.
I couldn't give you many inspiring examples, because I've received undivided attention from my parents since I was born. (which isn't as great as you all think, honestly.) I don't know how it feels to be neglected while your sibling basks in parental attention, but everything you said conveyed all those foreign feelings to me. Now, I understand. And I appreciate.

Seeing you sad almost made me cry, because I just came to realise how helpless you felt all these years.

Don't work hard for your parents. Everything you're doing now - tell yourself that it's for your future, not theirs.

I hope that helps you to get by these few years. And remember this: if you ever feel sad or just sick of everything, the fire-proof wooden doors of my house will always be open for you! =)

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Oh yes. I've noticed how people stare at me when I'm wearing my uniform. When it was the iconic TKGS uniform, people stared for (mainly) 2 reasons:

1) The emerald green works up some pyrotechnics in your eyes. Ouch, it prickles. (or even pickles, given the intense greenish-ness)
2) They recognise the tkgs uniform, and used to be tkgians.
(yes. The auntie selling the famous rice dumpling soup in Bedok was a tkgian!)

But when it's the hc uniform, they stare because
1) "is that nyjc/vjc/hci? They all look the same hor?"
2) They think hc is a top school, and they are waiting for me to commit some crime. (or something along that line, like punching a bus driver maybe?) Does the local press pay people who provide them with fodder for top news stories?
3) Uhhh. I don't know. It's nicer than the tkgs uniform? (albeit less comfortable)

I especially hate how some people change their perception of us with a glance at our uniform. No, it isn't a secret agent suit which can enhance my capabilities. It simply tells you about the school I belong to. Don't start having high expectations of me, because I'm just an another student; another mere mortal standing near you.

Uniforms: They cause people to have non-uniform opinions about students.
The irony.

robopreneur : educator's symposium

2009-05-30T10:34:00.007+08:00

long story... I shall type out the events in a chronological order, the way Mr Yong likes our physics files.

Don't read this if you hate grandmother stories. It's gonna be the grandmother of all my posts. I'm writing this for my team. (including hewei! well, you never know who reads your blog, do you?) Although I don't like toiling away at the NUS SRL very much, the thought that we most probably won't be going back anytime soon makes me sad. For now, we'll have to focus on

This post is for us to reminisce about everything we went through this week, lest we forget about our hilarious experiences. It's funny how 4 complete strangers came together for this project. And how good our team dynamics are! :D

Woke up in the morning to find my forearms dotted wildly with tiny bumps (which were not red. just looked normal) which made me bear resemblance to a patient with a STD. Freaked out for 10 seconds or so, and then proceeded with life. Maybe my skin is sensitive to Ambi's dusty exterior.

Lugged Ambi out of daddy's car as I stepped into school, focusing my eyes on the path ahead and dodging the curious gazes of everyone else. No, it's NOT my birthday.

Plopped Ambi gently down next to the class bench and sat next to her, turning on her switch with much trepidation to check if she was fine. Discovered (with great horror) that her head was stationary when she mouthed her pre-programmed phrases. Freak out (yet again) when I can't find the wire that leads to her head servo. Nicole, pea, jen, and shuhui come along and play with Ambi, offering their condolences. (remember? Ambi got paralysed...and it's all my fault) Ex-crush ignores Ambi, but who cares about him anyway, when Hewei will be with us soon to bring Ambi back to life? :D

After assembly, we carried Ambi down the canteen, walking by the cleaner uncle who enthusiastically asked us "你们要拿去丢掉的啊？".

(translation: Are you all gonna throw that thing away?)

I cursed him in my mind and mentally rolled my eyes, forcing a laugh.

Dr Lim took a picture of us with his dSLR, and commented that the "educated" word on her shirt was very dirty. -_- Sigh... Like hewei mentioned in his ppt, people who are much older than you don't take you seriously.

ok. You must be getting bored by this point, because I am. Let's skip to the exciting bits!

When we got to the AaHa! Room in Admiralty Secondary, I discovered that the laptop they were using there only has the old 2003 powerpoint installed. Our powerpoint was saved as .pptx, the 2007 ppt version. And I had to edit it.

CRAP! IT'S THE GAZILLIONTH TIME I FORGOT ABOUT THIS.

We frantically called our mentor (who still had a sore throat) to come down with his laptop, ASAP. At that moment, lutheng found out that Ambi's head servo wire came loose. And it was stuck in an inaccessible location. Sigh. I smsed this update to hewei, who promptly replied "Jus relax".

SIGH...

The 3 Princesses of Serendip

2009-05-26T08:32:00.003+08:00

are none other than lutheng, jiangying, and yours truly.

*ecstatic wail*

BBI FINALS!!!!!!!!!!!

Just when we got over the loss of our place in the finals yesterday, we had the serendipity of receiving Mr William Tan's SMS today morning at 8.03am.

ahhh!!!!!!!!!

Hehe random post. I'm typing this in the fishtank at 8.30am while I pon PE (volleyball).
Actually I came here for the aircon. :P

Hmm technically I didn't pon it, since I went to get my attendance marked already. And I did go to play volleyball with the effervescent Nicole for a while. :D Or should I have said evil? She whacked the ball into shuhui's head. A moment later, one of her massive spherical projects sliced through the air, missing jingbin's cranium by an inch.

Nina... hahaha I shall not mention anything about you. ;D Take care of yourself and your *cough*!

(pun intended)

k shall get on with my mundane school life. bye to slacking. =)

sick in the head

2009-05-20T17:33:00.002+08:00

Was down with food poisoning since Monday night. The nausea/stomach hyperacidity/general sian-ness persisted till Tuesday afternoon.

bleaurgh.

All my grand mugging plans blighted by an unfortunate choice of dish for lunch on Monday.

Currently, I'm forcing myself to fight off the powerful drowsiness induced upon me by all that medication. My mind feels heavy and it's gravitating towards my bed.

Nooooo... resist bedroom gravitational field!

Resistance is futile...
if <1 ohm

and this is genius. haha
http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts-apparel/jewelry/a38d/

now you know.

2009-05-04T23:33:00.002+08:00

What happened today morning was... unexpected.
It's not the most pleasant thing in the world to hand your (crikey!!) a present.
Mildly nerve-wrecking. And very telling indeed.
Oblivious as he may have been in the past, I'm sure what happened today has already elucidated the truth.
Way to go. (charges into wall, slumps into a lifeless heap)
Nevertheless, I'm still grateful for the arranged opportunity. HAHA!
And really. Thanks to Shu Hui for preparing everything!

I seriously doubt if the 'truth' on my part will be reciprocated in the future. You know how the truth can strike fear in us. (especially in sprinters. whahaaha) Anyway, I shall no longer pursue the matter even if this thing goes my way. Currently, I only have eyes for... the A levels, of course. (What were you thinking, you filthy-minded --- blog reader!) NO DISTRACTIONS!

Nina and I have shared much with each other over the long weekend. :) Sorry, can't share them here. But Nina's heartfelt words on Friday almost made me cry la. Never knew my sms would make you cry more. Hehe.
You will never know how much a simple act of kindness means to your friend.

Julia and I have had a pseudo-intellectual discussion about religion/politics/the AWARE organisation/homosexuality/terrorism over msn over 30 mins ago. Haha it's always great to have such discussions with you! =D Next shijia meeting ok! (:
You will never know all the right answers in life.

Jen can't wait to know what's going on! Patience, my friend!
You will never know what's going on until this Wednesday!

hee. :D