Sleepy Snail

A crazy man tried to punch me at beri uqam metro.

2011-01-08T10:59:00.001+08:00

I left school at 1130pm, took a metro from McGill and had to change line at Beri Uqam Metro station.

As usual, I walked past the group of people sitting on the seats, and tried to find a seat. I noticed this guy sitting with his snowboard which occupied 3 seats, and thought to myself, "Damn, this idiot took up my space for sitting." I also saw another older man sitting on the last chair which was besides the snowboard, but I didn't pay much attention.

So, I stood at a location around 10 footsteps away from the older man. I was thinking about the Java programming code I read earlier, looking at the ground.

Suddenly, I felt someone coming very close to me, so I immediately walked back a few steps.

I raised my head, and saw the older man looking at me angrily, trying to pick a fight with me.

I was totally confused and quickly shifted a few steps in another direction. The crazy man walked away from me, but he was looking at me the whole time, gesturing me to come over and fight with him. I ignored him and I turned my head, to see the snowboard guy standing near me. He said to me, 'Restez ici avec moi'(It means stay here with me). It took me like 3 seconds(partly because I hadn't spoken french in ages) to realise that he was trying to protect me from that crazy old man.

The snowboard guy's name is Leon. He told me what happened. The crazy man actually tried to punch me just now, but I dodged him. Actually, I didn't know that. I guess I had a spiderman's instinct inside me, haha. After Leon saw what happened, he stood and signalled to the crazy man to get lost. Guess what? The crazy man actually asked Leon if he wanted to try punching(me) too. Lol.

I am quite amused by this whole incident, and also impressed by Leon's kind act. He's only 18 years old! And I just added him to facebook :)

first earthquake of my life - 5.0 in Ottawa

2010-06-24T10:09:00.018+08:00

Malcolm was besides me in the office, and we were debugging my Java code when the first tremor occurred. I could feel the ground shaking and everything around me moving, and it lasted for around 3 seconds. I looked at Malcolm, and was wondering, "WTF just happened?". Actually, it never even occurred to me that that this was an earthquake. Sitting opposite us was another lady, and she looked shocked too.

Then another 3 seconds later, the second tremor took place, and it was so much stronger and longer this time. I think I could remember this scene for life. I was looking at her, and I could see everything around her oscillating. I was still shocked and didn't react at all. However, she looked so horrified. I swore I had never seen anyone looking so scared before. She looked at both of us and then dashed to the emergency exit. At this moment, I heard someone shouting, 'Let's run', and so I followed Malcolm and ran to the emergency exit, and quickly left the building since we were at the 1st storey.

Many people were already outside the building. Once outside, I started wondering whether the whole building would collapse onto us =s We could see people who lived in nearby houses getting out of their homes too. A colleague came to us and remarked that this was the 1st time he experienced such a strong tremor after living in Ottawa for 20 years . I wondered whether I was a jinx since I had only been in Ottawa for 6 weeks.

Looking back, I think that it was more scary to see terrified expressions, and people panicking to run to the emergency exit than the actual shaking of the walls and tables. David and Malcolm told me that they were taught earthquake drills during their high schools in Vancouver. Apparently, Vancouver lied on one of the tectonic plates, and experts predicted that there will be a very bad earthquake in Vancouver in the near future. Singapore schools never taught us any earthquake drills we never ever had any. They commented that rushing to the emergency exit was probably a bad idea. However, it also doesn't seem like a good idea to hide under the desks too since they looked pretty fragile.

And it was disturbing to realise that we could neither send any text messages nor call any people on our cell phones after the tremors. Twitter was down too! Since no cable was destroyed, the network was down probably due to the drastic increase in users. This really showed that in a real disaster, the likelihood of being able to contact your loved ones is extremely low. It took about 2 hours after the tremors for the network to resume operations.

I also asked around friends in Montreal and apparently, most of them didn't feel anything and some just noticed a slight tremor. The most funny thing is that a friend from civil engineering was giving a presentation on 'risks of earthquakes' when she felt the tremor. Lol. And on Twitter, the funniest tweet was "Quebec is finally separating?". Lol.

So lesson of the day: remember to check out the nearest emergency exit the next time I enter an unfamiliar building.

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

http://www.calgarysun.com/news/canada/2010/06/23/14492376.html#/news/canada/2010/06/23/pf-14488986.html

A 5.1-magnitude earthquake struck the Ottawa area at 1:41 p.m., sending thousands of people rushing into the streets from homes and public buildings.

The quake hit was felt as far west as Woodstock, Ont., and as far east as Chicoutimi, Que., but the epicentre appears to have about 30 km north of Buckingham, Que. -- roughly 100 km from Ottawa.

City Hall, the courthouse and all of the buildings in the parliamentary precinct were evacuated.

Schools have also been evacuated.

Sirens could be heard across downtown as people milled in the streets, but early indications were that there has been no major damage.

A chimney collapsed at 112 Lisgar St. after the quake.

There are several reports of power outages.

Toronto and London were also affected.

Among the many buildings evacuated in the seconds following the quake was Centrepointe Theatre, where more than 200 St. Pius X students were hosting their Grade 12 graduation. The theatre rocked violently several times, then continued rumbling for about 10-12 seconds.

The building fire alarms went off, and the building was immediately evacuated.

"That will make this one memorable," said grad Jamie Wilcox, 17, as he and classmates milled about in the parking lot.

Workers from the adjacent City of Ottawa building also spilled into the streets but no damage was evident. There were also no injuries reported.

City Hall, the courthouse and all of the buildings in the parliamentary precinct were evacuated. Schools have also been evacuated.

Sirens could be heard across downtown as people milled in the streets, but early indications were that there has been no major damage.

A chimney collapsed at 112 Lisgar St. after the quake.

The quake was also felt across the border in Buffalo and Albany, N.Y.

“The planes in our hangar were tilting back and forth, blast doors and hangar doors were chattering with force and the ground rippled under our feet noticeably,” said Levy Morris in an e-mail from the Ottawa airport. “Our building was evacuated for 30 minutes while it was checked for safety concerns.”

“Here in Embrun in the Township of Russell, my whole house shook, pictures were banging and things were moving around. It was so loud I thought the wash machine had an unbalanced load of clothes in it, but when I checked it wasn't even on. It was really scary,” wrote John Gervais.

This story will be updated as new information becomes available.

days in ottawa

2010-06-23T10:18:00.010+08:00

I am almost halfway through my internship in Ottawa. Working life is enjoyable in Canada so far, and they have a very good work-life balance culture here. People generally get off at 5pm(actually i suspect it's even earlier in some companies because there's traffic jam at 4.30pm already) and IBM here allows people to work from home. There are colleagues in my office who go to the office once to twice per month.

Ottawa is a much more boring place, compared to Montreal, and it's really troublesome to get to any places without a car. The bus frequency is extremely low during off peak hours and the weekends. It comes only once every half an hour. Occasionally, during the weekends, I will go back to Montreal and bid farewell to friends who are leaving Canada. It's really quite strange that everytime I returned to Montreal, I feel at home. haha

And IBM organised a camping trip for the interns. So this is my first time camping in Canada, and it's going to be 4 days long. Hope it will be great.

reading a friend's blog

2010-05-25T12:00:00.002+08:00

reiko translated the latest entry on yuka's blog for me, and this entry left me with a deep impression. she said that she brought 3 pair of chopsticks to montreal to give to people who helped her the most, and at first, she thought that it would be difficult to even find anyone to give to, but now that's she's leaving, she realised that even 100 pairs will not be enough. lol.

after staying in montreal for so long, she started to forget all the minor differences in japan, such as the hand straps in tokyo's metro(the things that we held onto in the metro, somehow montreal metro doesn't have it), and she's definitely going to forget many things in montreal. she felt so sad after realising this, and she told herself that she will never forget all the nice people she met here, and someone should shoot her if she does. and she will be content if people can simply remember her as the Japanese girl addicted to chocolates.

8 months have passed, and two semesters are over.

2010-05-16T09:19:00.006+08:00

8 months have passed so quickly, and I finished two semesters of school. Actually, I am forcing myself to write this entry. After neglecting this blog for so long, I really have no intention of continuing to blog at first, but then I promised winghang that I will blog after my exams, and so here I go.

Too many things have happened , and I don't know how to start actually. Anyway, I'm in Ottawa now, it's the capital of Canada, but it's just plain boring. The worst thing is that there's no metro(subway) system here, so I have to take buses every where I go. Waiting time for buses is long, and my house is not near downtown too. So I become lazy to go out after work. Oh, I'm doing my internship with IBM Cognos Lab there. I was so busy last semester, applying for internships, going for interviews, and studying, doing research, and also had a lot of fun ! I started learning ice-skating, I can more or less ice-skate now, but i think i would forget everything after the summer break. haha . Also, working life is good so far, and the attire is flexible, which means I don't have to iron my shirts so often because I can wear casual attire. Lol.

Throughout the 8 months, beside gaining academic knowledge, I have also made good friends with international students. Sad that some of them are returning home, and I may not be able to see them again. Moving to a new place, making new friends, settling down, and then leaving again, saying goodbye. Not the first time that I am doing this, but it's still not easy. But now, I know that what's more important is to be sincere and nice to each other, and friendships will naturally grow. And it's always better to be very sad that your friends are leaving because it means you really treasure your friendship with them.

-to be continued-

montreal crazy weather

2010-01-29T13:22:00.002+08:00

the last two days, montreal became warmer and the temperature was around -2 to 2 degree Celsius. i even told my friends, 'it's so warm these few days', and this afternoon, it suddenly started snowing non stop and within a few hours, the temperature dropped to -11degree celsius =s the wind was so strong and i had problems keeping my eyes open while on the way back home

and guess what? tomorrow, it will be -18 :S

Miami 2009

2010-01-02T12:40:00.028+08:00

Summary: Miami in December is Singapore without the humidity! I really miss going out in the open streets with only tee-shirt, bermuda and slippers. Moreover, the air is dry and I never sweated during the 6 days at Miami!

The flight is at 730am, and I had to wake up before 5am. Getting to the airport by taxi is expensive, and it's interesting to note that there are people(who are not taxi drivers) who provide similar transportation services using their own vehicles at a lower price. This is what singaporeans will describe as 'spoiling market'. lol. Anyway, I realised that to travel from Canada to US, the US custom checks is conducted at the Canadian airport.

In Miami, most people including random people on the streets, restaurant owners speak Spanish. This is the first time I heard of the american-spanish accent. Actually I cannot remember how the real spanish accent sounds like.

located at the famous bayside's market in Miami

My first and probably last NBA match. We had no plans for the first day, and we wandered around the downtown area. The match that day was between the hometeam, Miami and Utah, and so all the supporters were Miami's fan. The cheering was totally one-sided. Now i finally understand why the home-team has such a big advantage. Everytime the home-team has the ball, everyone will start screaming and cheering, while it will be silent if the opposiiton has the ball. And it doesn't just apply to the audience. Even the commentators are biased! When someone from the home team scores, the computer screen will show the name of the player and his name will be annouced. Nothing happens if the scorer is from the opposite team. Lol

Another interesting thing I observe is that the streets in US are labelled as 1st street, 2nd street..... 123rd street, NE xxx street, SW yyy street and so it's really convenient for people to roughly know the location and not get lost.

went to key west by a private tour bus, which was a famous attraction 200++km away(3hours) from Miami. actually it was quite disappointing because there's nothing much to do there, and the beach was not as good as the Miami's one.

graffiti at Key west

the famous key lime pie, imagine the taste of tiramisu replaced by lime.

everglades place to see alligators

i really like watching animals performance and I didn't get to see such things when I was a kid. If i ever have kids next time, i will surely bring them to the differents sea aquariums/zoos to watch such stuff.

I learnt that a Liger, (father is lion, mother is tiger) is the largest cat species in the world, but if the father is tiger, and the mother is lion, it's called a tigon and it's a dwarf in comparison. So interesting!

We took a cruise around the small islands, and apparently, the houses on these islands are owned by super rich and famous people like tom cruise and the ceo of a big pharmaceutical company. All these rich bastards!

we also went to this world's erotic art museum, and i uploaded some 'erotic' photos onto my facebook.

we also took a half an hour journey bus ride to go to the nude beach, but all we saw were old couples and old and ugly fat men. what a horrifying experience =s

end of first semester in montreal

2009-12-23T12:38:00.020+08:00

merry xmas to everyone, especially those who may have to work! haha

looks like this blog was abandoned again, haha. i have to wake up at 4.30am tomorrow for my trip to Miami, and now i'm finally blogging at 1143pm. i thought i had a lot of things to write, but now that i started writing, i really don't know what to write about.

i finished my examinations last thursday. life is usually quite busy, with research and coursework and all the miscellaneous stuff. 2.5years of army never really taught anyone in singapore to be independent. come on, everybody brought back clothes to wash during the weekends. now, i even have to sew buttons by myself, damn challenging, LOL. during the exams period, i was too lazy to cook, and my friends and i often dined outside which cost us like 6 to 7 CAD per meal. ouch! frankly, the biggest plus point about living in canada is chinese food can be found really easily as compared to europe. you make a trip to chinatown and u have quite a number of hk restaurants to choose from, and it isn't that expensive too.

i thought about my future plans for quite sometimes, and i more or less decided that i'm not aiming for a phd after my master's course. hopefully, having a master's degree here will give me some mobility in choosing my future job. one bad thing about having a doctorate degree is that the limited options for jobs mean that one probably has to relocate to a new and probably ulu place to work in after graduation. i don't think i have the mental capability to shift to a new university after 2 years, and move to a new location after 6 years, and possibly still have to move after doing a post-doc and other nonsense. besides, i kind of wish to have more money in my bank account now. sure, i am a lot more well fed than other students, but stipend for another 6more years? f off.

admittedly, knowing more rich people here must have screwed up my preception of the world a bit. the world is not fair, and it will never be. a friend told me that her mum gave her a surprise xmas gift by inviting her friend from her homeland all the way to canada to join them for a xmas holiday here. haha, elites and poor peasants like me live in totally different dimensions. i also just realised that my asian friends are also of higher social status than me. a prc friend's mum is a doctor and her dad is a professor, while a taiwanese friend's entire family are all phds holders.

when i was young, i was brought up thinking that hard work matters more than background and anyone can succeed despite being from a poorer family. actually i think it was at least partially true during my times in secondary school, but i seriously doubt it's the same case in singapore now. with all the intense competition in primary school and private tuition, i doubt i can enter a good high school if i am a pri 6 student now.

one thing i didn't understand is why aren't the h1n1 vaccinations free in sg? is it because they don't want us to have a clutch mentality? getting vaccinated helps the society from having an outbreak too, and i really don't see why they have to charge pple 30 dollars for it. sure, it isn't a big amount, but people who belong to the lower 10% of the sg's population will not be able to afford it. that's why i like canada. here, the vaccinations are free, paid for by the taxes. the poor pays lesser taxes but gets the same benefits as the rich.

it's late and i shall end with a few quotes i read and some photos:

http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=15108690

Foreignness was a means of escape—physical, psychological and moral. In another country you could flee easy categorisation by your education, your work, your class, your family, your accent, your politics. You could reinvent yourself, if only in your own mind. You were not caught up in the mundanities of the place you inhabited, any more than you wanted to be. You did not vote for the government, its problems were not your problems. You were irresponsible. Irresponsibility might seem to moralists an unsatisfactory condition for an adult, but in practice it can be a huge relief.

An American child psychologist, Alison Gopnik, when reaching for an analogy to illuminate the world as experienced by a baby, compared it to Paris as experienced for the first time by an adult American: a pageant of novelty, colour, excitement. Reverse the analogy and you see that living in a foreign country can evoke many of the emotions of childhood: novelty, surprise, anxiety, relief, powerlessness, frustration, irresponsibility.

The funny thing is, with the passage of time, something does happen to long-term foreigners which makes them more like real exiles, and they do not like it at all. The homeland which they left behind changes. The culture, the politics and their old friends all change, die, forget them. They come to feel that they are foreigners even when visiting “home”

my first snow storm!
snow was beautiful the first day. an interesting fact is that it's not slippery when you stepped on fresh snow, it only became slippery the next day where everyone has stepped onto it and the snow became dirty and disgusting. haha

My sister actually did a cute collage of me and butter. haha, but this was actually taken 2 years ago before my sep. We didn't bring her to the airport before i left for montreal.

and an old xmas song

don't be poor.

2009-12-10T06:10:00.004+08:00

these few days, i have been thinking whether i should do a phd or to simply find a job right after graduation. i need to decide soon because next summer is a good time to do either a research internship http://www.adsc.illinois.edu/intern.html or find some industry internship(preferably gaming). anyway, i spent quite a while talking to a few friends about it, and decided to go back to mugging for my examination next week.

i surfed the net for a while slacking from work, and read this from one of my favorite blogs from a guy who was from DHS:

http://takchek.blogspot.com/
and I graduated from college the same year. He went on to Business School two years after I started Grad School, and received the MBA 2 years before I got my PhD.

He is now a vice-president at a major Wall Street investment bank that survived the bank failures of 2008 and is set to receive record bonuses for this year. I am an academic postdoc, and has just received email from Payroll that my income for the next year 'may be subject to a temporary salary reduction due to the extreme financial emergency facing the University'.

His base salary alone is about 4 - 5 times what I am earning now. Sure we can both say our work suck, but hey at least he's better compensated than me, and he has bonus payouts. I will be lucky if I don't get a paycut.

We had identical O- and A-level grades. Such is life and the options we chose earlier have financial consequences.

this kinda makes the decision for me: don't be poor.

i still have a blog

2009-11-11T14:01:00.007+08:00

I almost forgot that I still had a blog until yusheng asked me why is it dead for long. Haha. One reason why I stopped updating is because most of my friends had stopped blogging, and I no longer visit blog so often. Naturally, I begin to forget the existence of my blog. Okay, I promise to update more often, though new photos are usually uploaded to facebook more quickly.

5 more weeks to the end of the semester. Life isn't all that smooth-sailing, and I did horribly badly for my statistics course. Damn it. I also have not been doing much research. And the most important thing of all: I need to re-evaluate my life goals and think of what i really want to do in my life.

One good thing about living overseas again for me is that besides realising the things that matter more to me, and who are the people that matter, I often also relieved my experience back in France. Back in Singapore, I hardly ever think of the days when I was an exchange student. But when i'm here, I'm often reminded of things that happened back then. Now that I stay in an off-campus apartment, I really start to appreciate the nice neighbours I have in France like Violaine and Marine, who made my life so much better then. I remembered telling someone that I have 400++ friends on my facebook, and if I talk to one everyday, one year will have passed quickly! I didn't keep in contact with many close friends after leaving, but I promise to do so after this posting this entry.

Of course, a few times, I also wake up in the morning(freezing cold usually because I never turn on the heater in my room) and wonder why the f*** am I in montreal, a place where I don't even have any friends whom I know for more than a year, where there is no dog greeting me at home? Will I be happier if I have just stayed in my comfort zone? Maybe I'm now happily working in ubisoft sg as a game programmer, and happily squeezing in the packed trains everyday, and getting fined for drinking plain water on the train. That's why it's important for me to keep retelling myself the purpose why I'm here.

Fortunately, montreal is quite a livable city, and it's convenient for me to go to anywhere with the 37CAD metro pass. There are also enough asian restaurants around to satisfy my food cravings. Actually, I believe that living in France has toughened me up quite a bit, and it is so much easier to adjust to life in Montreal after experiencing Condillac!(http://membres.lycos.fr/residencecondillac/accueil.htm). I still remembered how difficult it is to find a public toilet in France, and in Europe in general.

That's enough for today. Shall continue another day.

1st month in montreal

2009-09-28T12:18:00.029+08:00

the greatest trip in toronto is visiting the Niagara falls. here, we got to take a small ship which sailed to very near the Niagara's falls for us to have a good view. after looking at how magnificent and large the water fall, it's not surprise that there's no water bills in montreal(meaning people don't pay for water consumption).

i have been procrastinating to blog ever since i got here. i told myself that i must finish writing an entry before i sleep today. i have so many thoughts in my mind everyday, but i don't know how to express them in words(i'm a computer science, not a english major), so i shall simply think of some keywords and write things related to them.

who are my friends in mcgill?
got to know a few singaporeans in McGill doing undergrad. I am actually quite surprised that there are quite many of them doing full time undergrad here. Anyway, most of them are damn rich people. Sometimes, I do feel inferior knowing the large parity between my family's background and theirs. THIS WORLD IS SO FARKING UNFAIR. KNNCCB. So, this also leads to my less incliation to do phd, since doing phd means i will be poor for another few years. i need to START EARNING FARKING MONEY so that i can be RICHER than these kids will ever become. FARKED!!!

On another note, I also realised that almost every other Master's student I know is either paying full tuition fees or gets much lesser funding than me. So, i guess i should be happy that my boss pays me well and I am essentially getting a free ride and a free degree here. Haha.

And I also realise the large number of americans here. Quite a number of my french languages classmates are from new york!

Where do I get food?
Have been cooking my meals almost everyday. My stipend of 1000 CAD is actually enough to cover accomodation and for me to eat outside everyday. A meal outside costs like 8CAD after taxes. But being soon-to-be 25, I really need to save up a lot of money since a man without saving is a farking pussy,(once again, money is important) and it's so much cheaper to cook here because even though the taxes are high here, daily essential food items like rice, vegetables and meat are not taxed at all. I believe I will become a better chef than my mum after I graduate. Hahaha.

What the fark will I do after graduation?
believe it or not, even though i only just started school, i have already been thinking of what I should do after graduation. i usually plan my life 5 years in advance. hahaha. after staying in montreal for a while, and having been in france and many other european countries, i feel that canada is indeed a great place to stay in. initially, my plan was to finish my master and do my phd in US and then find a job in US. afterall, US is the land of opportunities and has great IT jobs. but now that i'm here, and after talking to people and reading accounts of students who didn't get PR nor job offers after studying in US, my inclination to go US drops drastically. Not to mention that US is a lot dirtier, more racist and has much higher crime rates(plus guns!) here. Besides, i always think that i'm not cut out for doing research anyway. so maybe a job in canada after two years will be good?

where is the love?
Saw this video on facebook of a couple from DHS who started dating way back in DHS and filmed a marriage video in DHS. They are only two years older than me, and I also spotted a senior in the video. Since Feburary last year, I kinda believed that I passed the stage where I don't mind being single for my entire life. But after watching this video, I actually feel like getting married very soon. Haha. Anyway, what i wanted to say is that when you are 14 or 15, when you like someone, it's really pure liking the person. When you get older, many factors become part of the equation, like whether the other one has a proper job. Love seems more like a transaction. Okay, i'm getting cynical again. moral of the story is : Farked. Why didn't i get a gf in DHS?

Where is my home?
Another thought that came to my mind after watching the video is the rate of change in singapore. Though the students filmed the video in DHS, the classrooms and volleyball courts are not the same as the ones 10 years back. DHS renovated the campus just last year. And actually, when I entered DHS, the campus I studied in was new and only two years old! I remembered when I was in secondary school, my primary school was closed and the streets I used to hang out when i was young changed. When i'm in NUS, one day I realised the macdonalds at kallang station was closed and the place was converted into a ERP gantry! I believed that as we get older, we tend to want to revisit places that brings back fond memories, and these are the very places that remind us of who we once were. But it seems like we don't have such luxuries in SG. Another contrasting incident was one day during our student exchange programme, sinhui told us that she revisited the basilique in Lyon and place where a few of us carved our names one year back was still intact. Haha. I really think that after a few years, sg would have changed so much that I don't feel any sense of familiarities when I returned.

how are my lessons?
As you can see, I have been using vulgarities in this post, and it's partly due to stress from assignments and projects. Argh, taking graduate modules sux.

i shall end by posting a few photos of mcgill's campus.

mcgill students like to suntan during their break time. eating lunch on the field is a common sight here.

toronto

2009-09-01T11:07:00.001+08:00

once again, telling people that you are from singapore doesn't mean that they know you are not from china! contrary, they think that singapore is in china.

my memory of the toronto trip is rather fuzzy now. we went to toronto by a greyhound bus which required us to change a bus at ottawa. greyhound is the same one that mabes mentioned about a girl being killed on the bus to alberta. however, we reached ottawa late and we nearly missed the bus to toronto. we managed to catch the bus but the bus was already packed. initially, the bus driver was unhapy and asked us why we were so late, but after understanding the situation, he apologized for our delay and promised to get another bus to send us to toronto. this is quite amazing to me, and i bet i will never get services in france. so the lot of us + two other passengers have an entire bus to ourselves!

on the first day, we went to The Exhibition. the usual ticket price is 15 dollars, but since it's the opening day, it costs only 1.75CAD. it's a very big area with fun fairs, games, and a lot of other random stuff. there were great discounts on clothes and merchandises, and Stitches(a popular chain store in canada) was selling guy clothes for 2.99CAD inside. the quality of the clothes was pretty good too.

reminded me of the candy apple i saw in disneyland two years back

very cute softoy, but i guess i'm a bit old for such games?

and somone was performing how to balance rocks

magic performance. during the finale, the lady had to escape from the water after being chained by locks.

this is the most exciting and freaky performance in the exhibition. the hypnotist got audience to go up onto stage, and hypnotized them, asking them to do all sort of silly things. it was freaky because those hypnotized looked awake and their eyes were open, but they were actually unconscious of what they were doing. for instance, the hypnotist got a girl to go up to the stage to shout her name whenever he touched the mike, but if he let go of the mike, the girl will forget her name. so every once in a while, the girl will rush up to the stage and then when asked for her name, she cannot remember because the hypnotist already let go of the mike.

the performance lasted one hour, and after that, the hypnotist woke up all of them and they didn't remember anythings that happened. before he woke up them, he told them that if you go to the toilet, you will recall back everything. so the sg girls actually followed one girl who was hypnotized to the toilet and they said that she was so embarrassed after realising what she had done. lol.

a similar performance 2 years ago.

first few days @ canada

2009-08-21T01:19:00.003+08:00

After a 6hours flight to tokyo, 2 hours transit, 12 hours flight to New York, 3hours transit, and a delayed 1.5 hours flight, i finally reached montreal in the middle of the night. the journey was long and the entertainment was quite boring, so i napped throughout the entire trip since i slept only 2 hours the night b4 my flight. security at new york is the most stringent, and I have to remove my sweater and shoes. the customs at US also seem the most hostile. oh, when we checked in our baggage, we were told that our luggages will end up in montreal and we didn't have to collect it in tokyo or new york. however, at new york it turned out that we had to collect our luggage and checked in them again at the baggage recheck in counter, which i thought was rather retarded.

anyway, my flight experiences so far showed me that air stewardess from the ang moh airlines are usually old aunties, while those from asia are a lot younger. i wonder what happen to singapore air stewardess after they get old. i doubt most of them can continue to work in some office/management jobs in SIA. but well, in singapore, even if you have a phd from stanford, you might still end up driving taxi. anyway, after i alighted, i took a cab to my apartment which cost around 42 CAD.

the first two days were spent on buying the essential daily items. lennard and i went to the chinatown area in montreal, and we lugged back one big bag of rice, soy sauces etc and to our horror, we realised that there were a few shops within walking distance from our house which sold the same stuff. i bought a rice cooker for 40CAD, and when i paid, i was shocked to see a 55CAD on the cashier machine due to the heavy taxes on electical goods in canada.

i went to walmart alone in the evening and it was a long 15minsto 20mins walk from a metro station. bought a fan, pillows, bedsheets and other stuff, and i felt like a cockster when i carried all these items and walked back to the metro station while most of other shoppers had their own cars. while i was there, i got a SIM card which allowed me to make unlimited SMS for 25 CAD. sadly, i had to first buy a SIM CARD which cost 35 CAD , and the activation fees were 35CAD. there seem to be unlimited hidden costs everywhere i went.

oh, the guy who attended me at walmart's mobile phone section was a black. i noticed that in new york's airport, all the counter staff at macdonalds are black. i was surpised the guy was so friendly and he explained to me patiently on all the different phones plans and prepaid cards. he was excited to see my mobile phone, which was a new model(i bought it one week ago in sg) and he even explained to me what's good about my phone. frankly, i was quite impressed that a counter staff doing such a mundane job can have so much pride in his work, which is something i never experienced in sg. when i left, i asked him if i can fill in any form to commend on his good servce, and his reply was,' no! don't worry about it. it's okay as long as god knows', LOL

the next day, i went to mcgill to collect my student ID, the process was efficient and i got a nice ID card(aka matric card in sg) quickly. at each station, there were people explaining to us things like the meal plans in school and also staff from libraries who told us how their libraries worked etc. once again, all of them were so filled with enthusiasm that i actually felt very happy and satisfied after this short trip to school. LOL

Not all those who wander are lost

2009-08-17T02:58:00.000+08:00

In 5 more hours, i will board the longest flight i ever have, transiting at Tokyo and New York. I hope my luggage will not get missing. =s

My last few days were busy. My lab had decided that I should add a new feature into our software before i leave, and sadly, my last few days were much spent with coding C++. I guess that even after I leave, I still need to complete some tasks for them.

I am not really that excited now, probably because I worked too hard for the last week and I haven't time to think about anything else. Stepping into an unknown world is scary, and not knowing what lies ahead is even scarier. I have not decided nor known what I intend to do after I get my master's degree. Sometimes, seeing that most of my friends have started working makes me a bit worried and I also feel bad that I am unlikely to contribute much financially to my mother for the next few years or so. Of course, the only consolation is that i actually get paid for doing research in an university and get a certificate at the end of the day. now, doing a PhD right after that seems most possible right now, but as what jj said, "your views and thinking will change after you go there". I hope he's right.

I often think about what I will be doing a few years down the road, and most of them are mundane stuff like programming job with big mncs, doing research in sg etc. the only exciting thing i have ever mentioned is "joining a international NGO to save the world". is it partly because i'm a singaporean and that's why my plans sound so boring and conventional? when i was in france, someone mentioned that his plan is to spend 1 year travelling and working throughout the world after graduation. mark suggested that since I used to do commnunity work, maybe I should consider being a professor in the 3rd world countries. Haa, i think it sounds like a good idea, but i wonder whether my mother will be happy that i'm earning less than what a fresh grad can earn in sg.

the only good thing out of this is that i feel like i have the freedom to consider what i really want during the two years. it's important to know what you really want at the end of the day, so that every step you take now is leading you into that direction. yet, enjoying the journey to try to reach for the goal is equally important. for me, i think i just have to wander a while more before finding my path.

just a few days back, xw asked me what age i intend to get married, and i answered, 'before 30'. lately, it dawned upon me that i have been doing nothing that can possibly let me get married b4 30, hahaha. actually before i entered NUS, i thought that it's ideal to marry at 27 to 28, but clearly, this is not going to happen to me since I am not as productive ~~chee hong?~~ as someone who actually get married during his student exchange programme in france.

anyway, i will be in toronto from 20th to 25th. Will update my blog after I'm back with more photos!

meaningful quotes

2009-08-09T13:08:00.006+08:00

been thinking about my life lately.
more on this in a later post.
here, i quote some meaningful phrases which I have been thinking about and which resonate with me

http://moduleblog.nus.edu.sg/blogs/cs3212/archive/2006/09/05/383.aspx

Acknowledging this, however, will not prevent me from trying to wake them up. How can it be that an obviously smart student has no other objectives than getting an A+ in his/her modules this semester? Is this going to continue this way in his/her life? After getting a job, will this goal turn into the goal of getting a big bonus at the end of the year? Is that what life is about? If the answer is "yes", then at least he/she should be conscious about this path and approach to life. That then could be part of what I mean by reflection.

As long as a person has outward measurement of success as the prime objective, it is completely hopeless to expect any kind of excellence or originality. I was discussing this with a friend over lunch today: The tragic part is that some of the smartest students, those who may seem to have the highest potential of achieving excellence or originality, are at the same time those who are the most focussed on outward measurement. Is it possible to light the fire within?

http://s-pores.com/2009/07/once-bonded/

Students in Singapore spend a lot of time knowing. They know that after six years of primary school comes four years of secondary school, followed by two years of junior college. They know the national examinations that act as wayposts along that path. They know that university is something of a jumbled mess but still, it’s a predictable three- or four-year programme, at the end of which they get a shiny sheet of paper certifying their successful completion of that stage of life.

After that, they don’t know. Will they get a job? Will it be a good job? What is a ‘good’ job? Will they earn enough money for the rest of their lives, to marry and own a flat, a house or a car? Will there be enough for everything?

http://www.colinandyenyen.com/wordpress/paved-with-good-intentions/

But now I refuse to postpone my dreams any further, and shelve them under some misguided notion of pragmatism. How often was I told as a child by my elders, “wait till you grow up,” “wait till after exams”, “wait till after you graduate”. I do not desire to wait until I retire. I might not make it that far. I refuse to be a walking mid-life crisis in the making.

But living one’s dreams is difficult because it is a lone undertaking. There is no such thing as shared dreams; they are personal creatures. And while my peers are making partner and buying cars, I live in rented student accommodation and scatter my work to the ocean of publications, hoping for a bite. Thus far, I have only been published a couple of times, far from being enough to pay the rent. Yet I do not feel despair. Trite as it may sound, I recognize that life is about the journey, and not the destination.

colours of the wind

2009-07-28T02:42:00.002+08:00

I watched Pocahontas when i was in primary school and I didn't understand it. I remembered I thought it was a sissy show because there's hardly any fighting scene at all. 13 years later, I watched it again on channel 5 and liked it a lot more now even though I only started watching halfway through the show.

I also recalled I saved up my pocket money to buy a Pochontas hand-held console for my sister's birthday. She still remembered the console but not the fact that I was the one who bought her the present. =.=

on a related note, i think the world will be a better place if filmmakers concentrate on making great meaningful movies like Pocahontas instead of JUNK crap like transformers. (i'm not the only one who thinks so)

You think I'm an ignorant savage
And you've been so many places
I guess it must be so
But still I cannot see
If the savage one is me
How can there be so much that you don't know?
You don't know ...

You think you own whatever land you land on
The Earth is just a dead thing you can claim
But I know every rock and tree and creature
Has a life, has a spirit, has a name

You think the only people who are people
Are the people who look and think like you
But if you walk the footsteps of a stranger
You'll learn things you never knew you never knew

Have you ever heard the wolf cry to the blue corn moon
Or asked the grinning bobcat why he grinned?
Can you sing with all the voices of the mountains?
Can you paint with all the colors of the wind?
Can you paint with all the colors of the wind?

Come run the hidden pine trails of the forest
Come taste the sunsweet berries of the Earth
Come roll in all the riches all around you
And for once, never wonder what they're worth

The rainstorm and the river are my brothers
The heron and the otter are my friends
And we are all connected to each other
In a circle, in a hoop that never ends

How high will the sycamore grow?
If you cut it down, then you'll never know
And you'll never hear the wolf cry to the blue corn moon

For whether we are white or copper skinned
We need to sing with all the voices of the mountains
We need to paint with all the colors of the wind

You can own the Earth and still
All you'll own is Earth until
You can paint with all the colors of the wind

really FREE photos

2009-07-26T04:33:00.002+08:00

I have this habit of developing my digital photos after accumulating too many of them. I somewhat believe that one day, all my hard disks will crash and all the digital photos will disappear. I am paranoid to the extent that besides backing up my data onto an external portable hard disks, I actually burnt two copies of my data on DVDs, and store them separately in my house.

Anyway, I like looking at photos in hard copy form instead of viewing it on the computer screen. Since SEP and my europe trip, I accumulated too many photos that one fine Sunday, I told myself that I must develop some of them. I chose around 400++ photos in the end. I usually go to this Kodak shop at Toa Payoh that charged only 15cents per 4R photo if you develop more 100 photos. But I also realise that snapfish has a promotion that charges only 15 cent per photo and the good thing is I don't have to make a trip to Toa Payoh. Sadly, after uploading my photos online and paying for the photos then I realise that I have to pay an additonal $8 for the photos to be delivered to my house. =.=

A few days later, I received the photos in a nice package. The quality didn't look good but I wasn't that particular about it. It was only until June and my sister commented that the colour looked dull and the quality was bad then I really start to feel pissed off that the photos were really KNS. Haha. I also decided that I am going to develop the photos elsewhere because I don't want to keep dull looking photos as memories. So one night, I decided to write an email to Snapfish ,complaining that i was unhappy with the photos. Though the website claimed that they had a refund policy, I was pretty sure that they wouldn't refund me anything. In my email, I just suggested that I should be refunded the credits for me to get some other merchandise from their website.

Surprisingly, they actually refunded all the money(including the delivery charges) into my credit card and they never asked me to return them the photos. Lol. So now, I have 400 extra photos and I don't know what to do with them. Most of the photos are my europe trip, cambodia trip and some random photos taken with my friends. So I spent a long time sorting out the excess photos into different categories, so that I can give them to various friends next time round. haha.

Anyway, these are my favorite kids in Cambodia:

Chandra

Sopia

sock koon

dali

By the way, do you know we took photos with MM Lee at Marina Barrage? Haha

nus commencement 2009

2009-07-23T00:42:00.007+08:00

It had been a few weeks since I last blogged. Let me also look at the recent photos I had taken to recall what had happened...

a bit late, but still, happy 23rd birthday!

there was paint-a-home on one sunday. we helped to paint an old man's house and all i can remember now is he kept telling us that his house is a lot cleaner and his walls are whiter than than the kopitiam near his house.

we ended early and we went vivocity to play in the shallow pool meant for kids, haha

i watched my friend's performance at xenbar.

my lousy video-recording doesn't do her justice.

next: I officially graduated from NUS in July even though I had finished my last examinations in December last year. the ceremony was boring, there wasn't even a guest-of-honour who gave a speech and the valedictory speech was disappointing.

my dog has a new friend =)

my dog also graduated from NUS!!!

my supervisor and I. i didn't know he was SO tall until that day.

my sec school classmate's sister studies in SOC and now the 3 of us graduate at the same time. he came NUS straight after his commencement at SMU. it feels strange to meet someone you haven't seen since sec school.

some other random things:

- i went for a medical checkup at a clinic at orchard. the doctor told me, "don't worry, you are going canada. it's a very beautiful place and all my patients who went there liked it so much that they never returned." i thought i was smart to spot a loop-hole in his statement and replied, "if they never returned to sg, how did you know they like canada?". the doctor answered, "most of them came back a few years later and saw me for another medical checkup. this time round, it's not for studies or for work but for PR/citizenship application." LOL.

- Isn't this world full of hypocrites? Is it possible to be a lawyer teaching human-rights laws if you are anti-gay rights ? What is the point of announcing that we want to have an open and inclusive society when you remove the person with alternative ideas from the parliament?
Similarly, stop bullshitting about a caring and compassionate society if you are willing to spend $6 billion for a Singapore Day in London for the elite kids/families in UK during a recession and yet reduce the already pathetic allowances paid to the disabled.

change of attitude ?

2009-07-03T00:57:00.003+08:00

just 7 years back, he told us to "Look yourself in the mirror and ask, am I a "stayer" or a "quitter""
actually, now i think of it, this is quite a difficult problem to solve. the more foreigners you bring in, the more local singaporeans feel detached from this island and become more inclined to quit. but when more and more singaporeans quit, they have no choice but to bring in more foreigners. haa

Still, Mr Goh said Singapore will not pull back on giving the young the best education and instead applaud those who wish to work and live overseas.

http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/singaporelocalnews/view/438902/1/.html

More than one in five of the top students from the 1996-1999 A level graduating cohorts are not working in Singapore today.

And of those from the same batches who went on to universities overseas without a scholarship bond, more than one in three are today carving out careers outside the country.

Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong gave these statistics yesterday to illustrate the urgency of getting young Singaporeans to sink roots here even as they become more entrepreneurial and break out into the global economy.

http://www.asiaone.com/News/Education/Story/A1Story20090629-151477.html

http://herluggage.wordpress.com/

2009-07-01T00:03:00.000+08:00

my sister's site, pls support!

http://herluggage.wordpress.com/

misconceptions about Computer Science research

2009-06-25T23:47:00.003+08:00

When I was still a junior computer science undergraduate, I used to believe PhDs are meant for people who cannot find jobs outside and for total geeks who have nothing else better do to with their lives.

In year two, the naive me then realised that most IT jobs in sg are menial, laborious jobs that require people to work long hours and with little joy and fufillment. I thought of doing a post-graduate overseas so that I may find better IT jobs outside this little red dot. Thankfully, chris recommended me to do my fyp under my current supervisor whom I sincerely believed to be one of the best professors in SOC. Even then while doing research, I still held certain misconceptions about doing research.

After 1.5 years of doing research in CS, i realise that doing research is actually very different from what I originally perceived it to be.

1) Writing skills are very important in CS research. I used to believe that good maths/programming skills are sufficient for great CS research. Nothing can be further away from the truth. In many ways, doing research requires one to be a great sales-man. The only way for your work to be recognized is through conferences and journals and the top few conferences are usually so selective that more than 2/3 of the papers will be rejected. Good writing skills are very important to convince people significance and your contributions.

A havard professor blogged a few days ago that "I often find CS papers tend to fluff up a fairly simple idea with a lot of marketing to make the ideas seem more earth-shattering than they really are."

2) Naturally, just like being a salesman, talking, presenting your work and networking are also important aspects of doing research. The chances of people actually reading your paper are very low even if it is published in a top conference. Networking with other good researchers, collaborations with people from other good universities may increase the profile your work. Making sales-talk is very important in conferences too. My prof made my post-doc practice her presentation speech for an entire week before the conference. Technical details are usually left out in the presentation, and the presenter usually focuses more on the intuitive understanding, implication and usefulness of the work.

3) Doing research has nothing to do with mugging for examinations. Getting all As means nothing in research. In fact, I begin to believe that a B person may often turn out to be more successful in research than an A person because he is less afraid of failures.

4) CS research is really quite different from software engineering. I believe most CS researchers are good programmers but I also think that most of us don't practice good software engineering techniques when doing research. This may be the result of having tight deadlines which lead to messy and unorganised code.

5) It is true that CS researchers usually have totally no fashion sense at all. A few months ago, there was a conference in NUS that invited many profs from top schools. There was this junior professor and his dress sense was totally cock. He tucked in his tee shirt into his shorts and his white socks were long and nearly reached the knees. hahaha.

6) However, the above also implies that your looks and dress sense means little in CS research. No one will judge you based on how weird your apperance is.

7) A PhD student usually turns out only as good as his supervisor. I think most people will disagree with this but I think this holds true generally.

I shall end this post with a comic strip from phdcomics.

DHS pwn TCHS!

2009-06-20T00:00:00.002+08:00

haha, really like this a lot. we dunmanians have better things to focus on than competing with u in silly things like the stupid L1R5 or A level scores. haha

At a conference last year, ex-principal of The Chinese High School Mr Tooh Fee San publicly requested current principal of Dunman High School Mr Sng Chern Wei to “加把劲”，给华中一点压力，“让华中不断提升，创造双

赢的局面”。

To which Mr Sng, the principal I truly admire, replied：“北京奥运会前，我去中国，看到一个很大的广告牌。画面是一个非洲籍的短跑选手，上面写着英文标语。我对这个广告标语为什么用英文写，感到奇怪。在中国看到的英文广告，通常错别字蛮多，但是那个没有。那个广告标语说“The person to beat is not the one in front but the one inside.”“要超越的人不在前面，而是在里面”。这正是德明办学的理念。如果有一天，我们真的超越华中，那是我们努力的结果，但不是我们努力的目的。身为德明校长，我认为学校不需要越办越大，越办越堂皇，可是必须越办越好，越办越温馨，越办越像一个家。”

德明加油！

http://www.zaobao.com/fk/fk090613_504_1.shtml

she's my new idol!!!

2009-06-15T00:03:00.003+08:00

the singapore plan

2009-06-11T15:03:00.000+08:00

PAVED WITH GOOD INTENTIONS:
How living in New York has illuminated for us the difference between the Singaporean Dream and the Singaporean Plan
By Colin Goh & Joyceln Woo Yen Yen

Former lawyer turned writer/cartoonist Colin Goh and educator Joyceln Woo are married and have been living in New York for the past three years.

COLIN & JOYCELN: We fell in love and in June 1998, we got married - true Singaporean style. The studio photography, the clothes, church, the dinner and the hundred of guests that we had never met before. What happened to us after that was not so typically Singaporean. Here are our stories.

JOYCELN: As a child, I could never sleep the night before the first day of school. The night before my first day of teaching was no different. I didn’t know what to expect but I knew that I was going to help kids learn, be the best teacher, and make a difference.

At my first staff meeting, the principal screened an image familiar to all new schoolteachers - the Prism. Like a magical crystal ball, the Prism told many things. It could predict how well students entering secondary school with 4 subjects at PSLE would do for the ‘O’ levels. With the Prism, we could evaluate each student’s potential grade in literature based on his/her PSLE grades and then tell if our school had “added value” to the child’s education.

Looking into the Prism, the principal announced that while she was concerned about the various aspects of development - Intellectual, Aesthetic, Moral, and Physical - “This year, our school will focus on the Intellectual.” By this, she meant that as teachers, we should all ensure that we stretched the potential of the students so that they performed “better than expected” at the ‘O’ levels. I noticed in the subsequent years that we never decided to focus on any other aspect of development. There was never an Aesthetic, Moral or Physical year.

The conversations in the staff room educated me considerably about the concerns of teachers.

“Oh, I heard you bought the new condo in Bukit Batok, that’s a good investment…”

“So which piano school are you sending your child to now?”

“Do you want to go buy diamonds with us, we are going to buy diamonds this afternoon.”

In my naïveté, this came as a shock. Why weren’t teachers talking about helping students learn or improving instruction?

And when they WERE talking about improving instruction, it was invariably:

“So what questions do you think will come out for this year’s ‘O’ levels?”

“Yes! Yes! I spotted the right questions!”

“You have to make sure your students write 5 ‘compositions’ and do 5 ‘comprehensions’ this semester.”

And when questions were asked, the answer was inevitably “Can’t change. That’s what the principal wants to see.”

The culture in the staff room was a mix of different groups:

· the Tai-Tais, women who had married well-off husbands, and who admired, respected and competed with each other for their Ferragamo shoes and Louis Vuitton bags.

· the few unmarried men who were mothered by the Tai-Tais as they were regarded as “good” men (i.e. hardworking and honest) but ironically insufficiently compelling marriage material (for why on earth would a functioning, virile, desirable man become a teacher?).

· the married men who usually lived in HDB flats (unlike the Tai-Tais and their non-teacher husbands), who generally kept to themselves.

· the older single women who were diligent in ensuring that all forms are handed in on time and helping students who need extra help get the preferred grades. They were usually more conservatively (and cheaply) dressed, and did not generally interact socially with the Tai-Tais.

· the expatriate teachers who were generally avoided by the other teachers and not expected to do very much because they either could not be trusted to do the work, were too difficult to communicate with, or were too troublesome to work with. And when they got together, they made plain their disdain for Singapore and its school system of which they were a part. Stereotypical as it may sound, those I’d met had invariably come to Singapore either to heal from a broken marriage (in which case, getting involved with a local woman usually came with the package), or had fled an unsuccessful career so they could return home and say, “I spent a few years in the Orient.”

· And the young teachers, bright-eyed and bushytailed, who believed they could make a difference, and who usually started out immensely popular with the students. They organized extra activities which they were not required to do, sat with students for long hours when they had problems, and generally tried to innovate with teaching. The Tai-Tais usually tried to matchmake the young single female teachers with single men they knew, but never the single male teachers. Seasoned teachers generally sat back and placed bets on when the neophytes would eventually burn out.

I didn’t know a single lazy teacher - everyone was extremely hardworking, taking work home, often physically running around as they hurried to different parts of the school. The teachers hardly had time to rest and reflect. It was as if we had been trained to work hard, but not to think.

What unites Secondary 4 teachers is the common goal of ensuring their students score well in the ‘O’ levels - preferably better in the subject that they teach rather than in another subject. Success is defined largely in terms of how many As produced in their class.

I remember one year distinctly - the school had done well in history and the Sec 4 history teacher was jumping up and down in glee, like she had won a war. On the other hand, the students hadn’t done as well in literature and the teacher was walking around with her head down, wishing that the bulletin board with the results didn’t place the teacher’s name next to the results of each class. While everyone congratulated the history teacher on doing well in spotting the right questions, we all didn’t know what to say to the literature teacher. We sort of patted her shoulder as if someone had died.

And for non-Sec 4 teachers, our overriding concern was assigning the required number of tests and exercises and grading them. Each semester, all our students had to submit binders containing their completed and graded assignments. And each semester, the teachers would spend several days of class time ensuring that the students had everything in place, as the submission of completed binders were a factor in a teacher’s evaluation. The binders would disappear for months because it would take the Head of Department that long to go through the binders and count how many assignments had been completed. It didn’t seem to matter if the teacher had taken 5 minutes to grade each composition or 30 minutes to make sure that the students received meaningful feedback. What was important was that the assignments were there.

I felt both angry and guilty that my idealism constantly came up against so many artificial obstacles. I felt that the obsession with bookkeeping and papering over any mistakes, real or perceived, allowed neither time nor space for innovation. Further, the mania to deliver standardized results trumped the notion of harnessing individual potential, of the teachers and the students.
Worse, I felt I could not raise these issues. There was a culture of silence.

My experiences are not about bad principals or teachers in particular. It is about ways of being and seeing that represent to me, the Singapore legacy that I have inherited. The principals and teachers that I talked about are not to blame individually - it is just so difficult to be and to see otherwise in the busy-ness, routines, and duties of our everyday lives.

I decided to leave to pursue graduate studies. Teacher education in Singapore is tilted more to the vocational than the intellectual and I wanted the space, time and knowledge to help me articulate and frame what I was thinking and feeling. On a more pragmatic level, I knew that nobody took the feelings of groundling teachers seriously and that people would probably listen to me more if I had a doctorate. I was disappointed, but still hopeful.

COLIN: I remember my first visit to New York. I had just graduated in law from University College London, and had several months before I was scheduled to take the English bar exams. Where most of my friends had chosen to do attachments with Singaporean law firms with the prudent aim of acclimatizing themselves with the career-to-come, I was paralysed with a single, terrible thought: “These are the last few months I’ll ever have to indulge my youthful passions.”

In an impulsive moment, and much to my parents’ annoyance, I blew every last cent I had and wangled myself a place in a cartooning course at Manhattan’s School of Visual Art. I had been cartooning for The New Paper for several years by then (my comic strip The Concrete Jungle continues to run in their august pages), but had no formal training.

I chose Manhattan because it was supposed to be the cynosure of the creative world, and most important of all, where Marvel and DC Comics had their headquarters. Where else would one study cartooning but in Spiderman’s territory?

Those few months were the most mind-blowing of my life. By day, I was either sequestered in a musty studio sketching Brazilian women or wandering the varied New York neighbourhoods. By night, I hung out with the other residents of the international hostel I was staying at - a diverse crowd of students from Argentina to Kazakhstan and everywhere in between. I had always thought Singapore to be a model of diversity and cosmopolitan progress, but over countless milkshake-fueled discussions in East Village hangouts, I felt like the proverbial mountain tortoise.

It was also the first time I began to question the path I was about to take. I was meeting people who were taking chances and simply following the dictates of their passion, whether it was art, dance or securities.

I had studied law largely because it was often cited it as the next best thing after medicine, which I knew I’d be awful at. Besides, SM Lee was a lawyer. What better endorsement could a Singaporean have? Despite being a published cartoonist and writer by then, I never thought about a career in the arts. It was a completely nonexistent option.

What was worse was that my parents never forced me into law. I just read their minds, I guess. Besides, all my friends seemed to be doing it too. It was the Singaporean Dream.

I also remember in my first year in law school, my parents telling me about SM Lee’s now seminal “If I were an undergraduate” speech, where he told JC students that were he a student now, he would not study law; he would be an engineer, join the civil service, then obtain an MBA and thereafter enter the private sector. SM Lee had switched from Coke to Pepsi. There was a New Dream.

For a moment, I thought, well, if I’m yesterday’s man, I might as well deviate from the path altogether. However, that year, the Singapore government decided it had too many lawyers and restricted the number of recognized overseas law schools. A rumour began spreading amongst the legal undergrad community that it wouldn’t be long before they didn’t recognize British qualifications altogether. We had to hurry and enter the Singapore workforce as soon as possible, before we were shut out. (As we now know, the rumour was unfounded, and Singapore now admits it needs more lawyers.)

Nevertheless, out of prudence, I shelved any thought of changing fields and became a barrister, then an advocate and solicitor of the Supreme Court of Singapore.

I joined a large law firm, again largely because it was commonly believed that it was good to bloody oneself in the trenches of the giants. I practiced shipping law, again an extremely prudent choice, what with our being the world’s busiest port. Further, it was perceived as exciting because shipping lawyers often had to go out to sea to arrest ships. (In truth, arresting ships is not vastly different from what loansharks do when they hang pig’s heads on debtors’ doors.)

I had a decent, almost enviable, income. I had to keep telling myself that, because the lifestyle was neither decent nor enviable.
Clients called me at 2 am in the morning. The High Court Registry nicknamed me “Mr. 5 O’Clock” because I regularly filed papers right under the guillotine, never of my own volition. My only pleasure was catching up on industry gossip while waiting in line to argue before the court registrars. There was not a single Chinese New Year holiday where I would not find myself in the office. My parents only caught fleeting glimpses of me early in the morning when I rushed to work, or late at night, when I stumbled in, surly and mentally exhausted. I saw Joyceln, then simply my girlfriend, for a few precious, stolen hours on Sundays.

But I had the job, and more important, the income. They brought me a measure of social acceptability. Parents’ friends would nod approvingly, non-lawyer friends would remark how much lower their salaries were. I made enough to afford membership in a club I never had time to step into, and for season parking in town. I had credit cards and designer ties. I could share war stories about work that might have seemed glamourous to non-lawyer friends, weaned as they were on a diet of Ally McBeal. I was in the secure embrace of the Singaporean Dream.

My epiphany came as I was descending the gangway of a very large oil tanker. At a height of ten storeys or more, the gangway abruptly slipped its moorings and fell several feet. I found myself in mid air for several terrifying seconds. Luckily the crew managed to secure it again. As I retrieved my dropped manhood, I saw bits of the vessel fall into the sea below. If I had not held tight to the chains, I would be dead.

When I told my colleagues about it, no one batted an eyelid. It was simply one of the hazards of the job, like the long hours and the symbolic fellating of clients. Some even quipped, “Who says law isn’t exciting?” But working late that night in the stale air of my office, surrounded by musty documents and lit by the sickly iridescence of my computer monitor, I knew I had to get out.
My brush with death made me reflect on my life, as I suppose all encounters with the reaper must do. I realized I was unhappy. Not weeping-and-gnashing-of-teeth unhappy, just that dull ache of uninspiration. Yet, on paper, I should have been completely content.

My conviction was reinforced when I passed my boss’s office and saw her toiling away. Much more senior, she was still keeping the crazy hours of a junior lawyer. She had a brilliant mind, equity in a giant and prestigious firm and a sizeable income, but I realized that I didn’t aspire to her lifestyle. And she was by no means unique. If I did not aspire to be my boss, then what was the point? My life stretched before my eyes, and I did not want to take another step in its direction.

I then made a classic Singaporean evaluation: if I’m going to suffer, then by god, I’ll suffer for more money. I figured American lawyers make the most money, so that’s where I’ll go. I decided the fastest way to do this would be to do a one year Master’s degree, preferably in an Ivy League university, since it would provide me ingress into the American market.

I spoke to Joyceln, and told her that the only place I wanted to go was New York, because I wanted to recapture a little of that energy I had felt years ago. Despite some reservations (New York has a not wholly undeserved reputation), we both applied to Columbia University, New York’s only Ivy League university. Miraculously, we were both accepted.

We quit our jobs, got married, emptied our bank accounts and left immediately.

JOYCELN: When applying to do my doctorate at Columbia’s famous Teachers College, I spoke to several professors at the only education institution in Singapore to find out about possible financial support. I had intended to study curriculum and technology, and felt my experience teaching as well as a stint designing educational software in an IT firm would be valuable.

However, the door was abruptly slammed in my face when I was told over the phone, “If you are not in computer science, and not a first class graduate, there is nothing we need to talk about.”

Perhaps spurred by anger, I worked like a demon at Teachers College and earned several academic awards, including a doctoral research fellowship which covered both tuition and a stipend, and came unencumbered by any bond, moral or otherwise. The myopia with which I had been treated had ironically turned out to be a blessing.

I even met with our Education Minister when he visited Teachers College. Of the questions he asked me, two stood out: “When are you going back to Singapore?” and “When are you going to have babies?” It hit me that I had never spoken to the Minister when I was teaching in Singapore. I wondered: am I valuable to the country only after I leave?

COLIN: Armed with a Masters from Columbia Law School and the grandiose title of “Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar” which Columbia had over-generously bestowed upon me, and having passed the New York bar exams, I knocked on the doors of some of the largest law firms in the world.

I recall one battery of interviews being carried out in a large hotel, where prospective lawyers would shuttle in and out of the rooms, each occupied by interviewers from the firms.

A fellow prospector asked me, “Which other profession requires you to shuttle from hotel room to hotel room?”

“Prostitution,” I remarked, and we both laughed.

It proved a prophetic statement, for when touring the offices of prospective firms, instead of feeling pumped, I felt horrified by the all-too familiar office layout, the mounds of paper spilling onto the floor, the designer suits thrown over the backs of chairs.
The last straw came when a partner of one Midtown firm patted me on the back and said, “I think you’d be perfect to help work on our port project out in Saudi Arabia!”

It suddenly hit me that I was not embarking on real change at all. I was merely rearranging the furniture. Like a good little boy, I had made all the pragmatic, sensible decisions… and it was about to push me into the abyss. I was still trying to achieve the Singaporean Dream, except overseas, and on a larger scale. Well, not exactly…

It was then that I understood the difference between the Singaporean Dream and the Singaporean Plan. And what is the difference?
I suppose the Dream has to be one of searching for peace and the liberty to conduct one’s life as one sees fit.

That’s probably what my ancestors sought when they left China: the governments of the Ming and Manchu were ruthlessly restrictive of cross-border commerce, the lifeblood of my ethnic Hokkien and Teochew forbears.

And no doubt it was the Dream, fueled by hard work and courage, that has made Singapore the indisputable commercial success it is today. And our story is a wonderful one: the Little Island That Could.

However, invariably once people attain success, they start to canonize the steps they took to achievement. This is how Dreams become Plans, and how one hegemony replaces another: the search for peace and liberty becomes get into a good school, then a good university, then a stable job, then buy property and stock. The problem is, then what?

There is nothing inherently unique about the Singaporean Dream. The American Dream of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is substantially the same. (And especially in the upper middle class, the American Dream is fast becoming a Plan too: prep school, Ivy League, Wall Street.)

But what to me gives America more hope is that they still celebrate mavericks; they may never find happiness, but their liberty to pursue it is sacred.

My experience in Singapore was, however, very different. There were always people telling you what and how you should do things, and imposing penalties for deviation. There were ‘right’ schools, ‘right’ professions, ‘right’ strategies.

Of course there are those who would argue that ultimately, the choice is one’s own and that there is nothing to prevent one from doing what he or she wants in Singapore. After all, isn’t it one’s fault for caving in to peer pressure? I would humbly submit that while theoretically true, such an argument betrays an ignorance of the combined workings of hegemony and power.

The issue is how expansive the reigning ideology is. In Singapore, the dominant view is to do whatever works (whatever that may be, and regardless of who it worked for). In New York (I won’t pretend that America is homogeneous), the prevailing view is that everyone should find what makes him or herself unique, and capitalize on that.

Manhattan is smaller than Singapore, yet there is space for both Wall Street Wizards and Alphabet City Shamans to coexist. Despite occasional border skirmishes, there is recognition that the city would be a lot poorer if everyone marched to the same drum.
An overly romantic myth? Perhaps. But that such a myth could persist in a hostile and cynical environment like New York, was encouraging to me. And anyway, the ‘fulfillment’ promised by the Singapore Plan was equally illusory. In a competition of myths, I chose the one that gave the most latitude to one’s passions over the one that indulged one’s fears.

JOYCELN: I think the most striking thing about New York is that so many people here are in transition. They don’t know where they are going to be or what they are going to be doing in 6 months’ time. But they are all working towards their individual dreams, in their own individual way, and not according to some mandated blueprint or destination.

The receptionist in my building is also an actor. I recently met a waitress who was a graduate student in philosophy. I have classmates who are not only still at work, but who also shoot films whenever they can.

Until New York, I didn’t know I could be poor and still volunteer to help others who are more needy than me - not tomorrow, or next year, or when my income reaches a certain level, but today.

I now tutor the children in my neighborhood who need help but can’t afford to pay. I didn’t know how great it feels to be able to write, and express my anger, worries, and joys. I didn’t know that if I am dissatisfied by policies, I can get together with others to express it.

Just last week, there was a public school that was boycotting a state-mandated test because the test was taking away precious instructional time. What a novel idea! I didn’t know I was not alone, that there are other Singaporeans who think like I do, who want to make a difference but who are afraid and are so used to being silent.

COLIN: The insidiousness is this: in adhering to the Singaporean Plan, I was acting pragmatically, but ultimately, dishonestly.

As late as the interlude between pupilage and practice, I had written a play that was performed for the Singapore Arts Festival Fringe, for which the British Council had sponsored me to attend the Royal Court Theatre in London’s prestigious theatre school. Further, throughout my years of practice, I also managed to continue cartooning The Concrete Jungle. While I enjoyed writing and drawing, never for a second did I think this might be a career. Worse, I felt compelled to downgrade their importance in my life. First was money, then pleasure. It was simply un-Singaporean to think one could get pleasure without money, or that working should be pleasurable.

But now I refuse to postpone my dreams any further, and shelve them under some misguided notion of pragmatism. How often was I told as a child by my elders, “wait till you grow up,” “wait till after exams”, “wait till after you graduate”. I do not desire to wait until I retire. I might not make it that far. I refuse to be a walking mid-life crisis in the making.

But living one’s dreams is difficult because it is a lone undertaking. There is no such thing as shared dreams; they are personal creatures. And while my peers are making partner and buying cars, I live in rented student accommodation and scatter my work to the ocean of publications, hoping for a bite. Thus far, I have only been published a couple of times, far from being enough to pay the rent. Yet I do not feel despair. Trite as it may sound, I recognize that life is about the journey, and not the destination.

JOYCELN: In Singapore, a considerable amount of talk in education has been about continuing to be competitive in the global marketplace. Singapore seems to have done well in this respect - we have consistently come in first in the International Math and Science Study.

But in tandem with the fear of losing out on notional global competitiveness is the willingness of many educators, policy-makers, and parents to “train” the young to delay their dreams, desires and play for a future goal, to “wait till after you finish your homework,” to “wait till after the exams” while at the same time plying them with material bribes.

On the global front, it is ironic that the US is trying to emphasize academic standards while Japan, who also finished in the top ranks of the International Math and Science Study, is trying to cut down on the curriculum to allow more time for play. Both cite global competitiveness as their reason for doing so. One wonders as a country, whether we are listening to the everyday experiences of our own children, parents and teachers, or simply responding to some speculative construction of what is needed to be competitive.

Can anyone say for sure what’s needed? Only a few months ago, countries cried out for schools to produce more dotcommers. A look at the rollercoaster line that is the NASDAQ should be cause for circumspection.

There are signs that children in Singapore are straining under this ethos. Recent newspapers reports have reported that parents are spending an inordinate amount of money and time to send their children for after-school tuition so that they can achieve better results; scoring high marks in tests and exams have been found to be a top concern for students; the average 10 year-old has been found to spend 6 hours in school and up to 8 hours on homework and tuition each day, and, students have been reported to experience physical reactions such as diarrhoea and asthma attacks during or just before exams. Is this education, or child labor? Has scoring well in tests become the reason for tests themselves? How do teachers, parents, and teachers begin to imagine our lives differently?

COLIN: I think it is important not to wholly discredit the Singapore Plan. It worked for some and may yet work for others. However, it is also true that the road to hell is paved with good intentions and that it is always an error to confuse what is with what ought to be.

JOYCELN: Consider these 2 stories. Which is closer to yours?

You wake up everyday and work from Monday to Friday, and often, Saturday too. If you finish work early, you and your partner go to your parents’ place for dinner and see your child for a few hours. If you work late, you buy a packet of char kway teow from the hawker centre but eat it at home because it’s too warm to eat there. You’re not crazy about the job but you know that if you keep at it, you can afford a car in 3 years’ time, and in 5 years’ time, buy a condo close to the primary school you want to send your kid to. Your conversations with people are either for the purpose of networking, work, or for familial obligations you cannot avoid. On weekends, you play golf with your friends at your country club or watch a movie with your partner. Once a year, you go on a ten day vacation to New York, London, or Paris, and when your children are big enough, Disneyland.

Alternatively, you wake up and you have no idea what is going to happen today, tomorrow, 6 months or a year later. Ironically, because of this uncertainty, all possibilities exist for you. You can be the Prime Minister of Singapore, you can make a movie, you can cook a meal you have never cooked before, eat at a place you have never eaten before, you can color your hair red, you can skip instead of walk, you can volunteer at the school you have always wanted to volunteer at, you can write a book, or you can have a baby even though you don’t have a maid. You have conversations with people who set your heart palpitating and your mind on fire. Your weekday is not so different from your weekend because everyday you are thinking, creating, and more important, imagining.

Most of us recognize the first story and its pursuit of the 5 Cs of “cash, condo, car, country club, credit card.” It is the Plan, which imposes a conclusion on you, and you work in order to make all the pieces fit. A bus stop advertisement I saw recently said it best: “We spend all our youth chasing money, and when we attain it, we spend all our money chasing youth.”

A Dream, on the other hand, carries you on its wings to worlds that your heart and mind have never known.

COLIN: My fault was accepting that the Plan would naturally work for me. One doesn’t have to accept a legacy one inherits. I was complicit in my unhappiness. I did not question enough, whether it was my elders, the government, newspapers, consultants, whatever. I foolishly let others make up my mind for me. I rather fear I am not alone in this folly.

If there is any blame to be laid, it is the upholding of a compliant, unquestioning culture; that some people should never be challenged because of age, status or whatever. It is not solely the establishment’s fault; all political parties are entitled to play politics. But it is wholly our fault for not fighting for what we believe in.

COLIN & JOYCELN: Criticism and disagreement is not treason, and our words emanate as much from our dissatisfaction with, as our love for Singapore. We simply believe that we are more than our legacy. This is the dream of immigrants everywhere, whether they arrive in Singapore or on Ellis Island.

Postscript from Colin & Yen: Well, that was written yonks ago, and things have definitely changed, even if our beliefs haven’t. We hope to write an update to “Paved” soon, detailing how we went about trying to make our dreams work for us. So please check back often!

project natal

2009-06-02T21:52:00.002+08:00

johnny lee said:
Speaking as someone who has been working in interface and sensing technology for nearly 10 years, this is an astonishing combination of hardware and software. The few times I’ve been able to show researchers the underlying components, their jaws drop with amazement... and with good reason.

i do not mind working for free if i can work on something like this.

wondergirls' nobody

2009-05-23T10:53:00.002+08:00

workaholic boss

2009-05-22T00:21:00.001+08:00

Had some time on the plane. I wrote up possible scheme for memory
efficient M*MDP that I discussed with David earlier. Yz, Shao Wei, the
new design should be compatible with something like this.

Regards,
WS

who in the right mind will write data structures and algorithms on a PLANE?

quality of research in sg

2009-05-15T00:49:00.003+08:00

In the overall ranking, NUS was ranked 10th in Asia and NTU was ranked 14th.

Let's look at two criteria

1) number of papers

NUS: 10th
NTU: 39th

2) citations per paper
NUS: 28th
NTU: not even in top 100th =s

conclusion?
we published a lot of junk papers.

evilish

2009-05-11T23:35:00.003+08:00

secondary schools generally bring back good memories for me(though i insist the education i received is crap). i hardly reflected on things that had happened, and i also didn't realise little things that i did or didn't do might had affected other people's lives significantly.

my peers are terribly good at ostracizing and labeling people as outcasts. once someone is labeled as one, people usually make jokes behind his/her back and we don't really hang out with the person. and the worst part is that if u r a female outcast, the forfeit for other people losing a dare/game is that the loser(a guy) has to do things like telling you he likes u.

not long ago, i realised a friend W knows J. W asked me about J's secondary school life since J never mentioned much about it. actually J wasn't exactly popular last time, and was often ridiculed at.

today, a friend G told me that she happened to know a friend from sec school K. K told her that secondary school days were the most terrible period of her life, and it made her stronger etc, and she mentioned about the forfeits thing that happened to her frequently. K was quite disliked among my peers, and now that i think about it, she really had a terrible experience in school. in fact, it is not too far off to say that such bullying probably destroyed her self-esteem and pride from young.

even though i never really bullied both of them directly, i m pretty sure i joined in making fun of them behind their back occasionally. may i be forgiven for all the evil things i had done. =s

Yoo Ye-eun

2009-05-11T22:34:00.002+08:00

this girl was born blind and adopted by a couple who knows nothing about music. at 3, they realized she can play any songs after listening to it once!!

uncertainty

2009-05-09T00:24:00.002+08:00

start to wonder where i will be a few years down the road. maybe jobless and begging in the cold streets of montreal? =s

i am doomed by being born in the wrong month?

2009-05-03T00:16:00.003+08:00

I just finished reading the book outliers by malcolm gladwell. I remembered when I was in primary school, I remembered telling my mum(or is it my classmates?) that I am disadvantaged in school since I am born in October and most peers, being born earlier than me, have better developed brains than me. Of course, no one believes me. argh.

1) the start of this book argues that canadian hockeys players are mostly born in the first 3 months of the year because the selection for hockeys players start at a very young age, and bigger-sized children who are born earlier tend to get selected by the best hunters. After the selection, these children are under better coaches and tend to train more and then eventually really become better because of their extra training.

In a similar fashion, in the US, 'the highest stream of postsecondary education- students belonging to the relatively youngest group in their class are underrepresented by 11.6%'. In other words, if this theory holds true in NUS, the percentage of students born in Oct/Nov/Dec should be only 13.4%(25-11.6). This is a result of having a system that identifies smarter children at a very age, and kids that are born in earlier months have greater advantages since they are usually put in better classes in schools and get to learn more.

See! From young, I already know that being born so late means that I am doomed for life. =s

2) The book describes the two different parenting style adopted by the middle/rich class and the working/lower classes and how the former leads to greater success for the children. The most sad thing while reading this is that i can notice the all similarities of my education in DHS with the parenting style adopted by the lower classes.

3) "autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward - are the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying." phew, glad to read this. IT jobs in sg = no autonomy, no complexity and little rewards for great efforts.

Anyway, unsurprisingly, the book argues that an environment(told u all that being poor sux!) is one of the most important factors for success and it gives an account of the smartest person in the world who didn't even get a degree and is now working in a horse farm.

updates

2009-04-27T00:03:00.006+08:00

Just some boring updates.....

Life has been quite peaceful and enjoyable ever since I quit my previous job and took up a research assistant job in my former lab. For the first two weeks, I decided to try out tele-working from home and i concluded very quickly that my productivity was too low since I worked up at around 10am and started doing work only at 1pm. Haha. So now i bought a bus and train concession for $93 per month and started waking up at 7am and reaching NUS by 9am.

Two weeks ago, our YEP team concluded our overseas expedition with a sharing session with APSN. YEP stipulated that to be eligible for their funding, we must organise something to 'contribute' back to the local community. So we got these mildly intellectual disabled people to come down to NUS and we organised some video sharing session and games with them. Frankly, I attended this session with little expectations. Yet, the event turned out to be enriching and I'm glad I turned up. At least I knew that the mild IDs are very much like normal people and have worries like everyone else. One of them even told me about how badly paid she was, and how her colleagues bullied her at work.

The volunteer in charge of them told us that once he brought another group of IDs to watch a movie. When they were on the bus, a pregnant woman actually shouted at him and scolded him loudly for bringing the IDs to public places and potentially spreading their 'diseases' to her unborn baby. WTF.

Anyway, I feel kinda weird that my peers are emo-ing about graduating from NUS on facebook. Maybe it's because i'm in a not-here-not-there situation since I am a NUS graduate who has not attended commencement. And I didn't have a very 'happening' last semester since I was taking classes alone and bulk of my time went to my fyp research project.

Grad School
Interestingly enough, P.P from Waterloo actually called me all the way from Canada to persuade me to join his lab instead. Between Mcgill, UBC and Waterloo, I ended up choosing McGill mainly because I figured that if I wanted to go somewhere else for my PhD after getting a Master, J.P is probably my best shot. Besides, my prof David seemed to think highly of her. This is rare because he's that kind of person that rarely praised anyone. Of course, my horny bastard guy friends will say that I choose McGill so that I can work under a chio prof, haha, and I shall not deny that. haha.

On Friday, I renewed my passport for $70 and it was only extended for 5 more years. Then I went down to Automobile Sg to get an international driving licence. To my horror, it was only after paying $20 then I realised that it is only valid for one year. I should have done it in August lar. =.=

Went down to Ubis*ft for my final last round of interview. Haha. I had applied for a game programmer in Janurary, and a few weeks ago, I attended their technical test selection which basically was a quiz on c++, linear algebra, boolean logic and debugging questions. The second row of interview was with two senior programmers who commented that they liked everything about me except the fact that I have no relevant portfolio to boast. On friday, the HR manager told me that they only shortlisted 50 people for the technical test and I am now one of the top 10 =s. And she told me that SG govt had setup this scheme where game programmers get sent to overseas studio for training and then serving a bond in sg after that. I am amazed that SG tried to trap people with bonds even in the gaming industry. Oh, then i had a talk with the technical director, who was coincidentally an alumni from mcgill, and he said the winter was terrible because it was usually -20degree Celsius, and the whole place was gloomy during the winter season. Actually, I feel very positive towards Ubis*ft after all these interviews, and it's because the people who interviewed me mentioned that they loved their jobs. I think that is very rare esp in sg.

my first paper accepted!!!

2009-04-16T10:27:00.000+08:00

On behalf of the RSS area chairs, I am delighted to inform you that your
submission 128 entitled POM*Ps for Rob*tic Tasks with Mixed Obs*rvability
has been accepted as oral presentation for publication at RSS 2009.

Only 39 of 154 submissions were accepted or conditionally accepted. The
program committee took great care in reviewing your submission and wrote
thorough reviews. During an in-person area chair meeting, the area chairs
carefully considered your submission, the reviews, your rebuttal to the
reviews, and the discussion among the reviewers.

You can review the final consolidation report made by the area chairs at
https://cmt.research.microsoft.com/RSS2009/. While your rebuttal comments
were taken into detailed and elaborate discussion among reviewers and area
chairs after your rebuttal period to make the final consolidation report
and the decision, the reviews themselves are unchanged.

Please note that there is no quality difference in oral or poster
presentation at RSS. We value both poster and oral presentations and the
assignment was considered carefully based on the topic, style of the work,
balance of areas, etc. Often the best paper awards come from the poster
presentation (the chance is equal for oral or poster as there is no
quality difference).

You must submit the camera ready paper by 5/15 based on the suggestions
given in the reviews and consolidation report carefully. You will use
the CMT system to do so and the instructions will be emailed separately.

how to get A+ in SMU. lol

2009-04-12T09:49:00.001+08:00

love export video

2009-04-05T23:52:00.000+08:00

NUS COOP is loan shark

2009-04-02T17:51:00.001+08:00

Hi,

Do you have the following books?

1) Gilbert Strang's, Introduction to Linear Algebra.4th Edition
ISBN 9780980232714
Price - $197.20, stock is not available and needs to be indent from overseas if order is placed.

2) Edwards, Henry C., and David E. Penney. Multivariable Calculus. 6th ed. Lebanon, IN: Prentice Hall, 2002. ISBN: 9780130339676.
Book is out of print.

3) Bjarne Stroustrup, The C++ programming language
ISBN 9780201700732, 3rd Edition.
Price- $88.50, takes 6-8 weeks to arrive if order is placed.

4) Christopher M. Bishop, Machine Learning and Pattern Recognition
ISBN 9780387310732, published by Springer.
Price- $144.80, takes 4-6 weeks to arrive if order is placed.

Can you please quote the prices?
*Please be informed all prices quoted are before GST.

i sent the same email to Clementi's book store

1) Gilbert Strang's, Introduction to Linear Algebra.4th Edition
Not at all

2) Edwards, Henry C., and David E. Penney. Multivariable Calculus. 6th ed. Lebanon, IN: Prentice Hall, 2002. ISBN: 9780130339676.
Out of print

3) Bjarne Stroustrup, The C++ programming language
ISBN : 9780201700732
No stock @ $ 75.70, need to indnet for about 6-8 weeks

4) Christopher M. Bishop, Machine Learning and Pattern Recognition
Not at all

As you can see, COOP overcharges the 3rd book by $13. I was sarcastic and i replied to COOP, "do you really think that anyone will buy a book for $197 when they sell it online ( http://www.wellesleycambridge.com/ ) for 75USD?"

let's see if they will reply.

lab at home

2009-03-31T15:56:00.000+08:00

my laptop is now my cpu!!

freak

2009-03-27T23:29:00.002+08:00

i went jogging alone yesterday night at 1130pm. my sister was taking a bus and she saw me. today she told me that she saw me jogging with a female friend yesterday. =s

and my sis is sick with fever now. =s

real programming jobs exist

2009-03-18T20:09:00.002+08:00

http://www.janestreet.com/
http://www.deshaw.com/JobOpportunities.html

python paradox: "you could get smarter programmers to work on a Python project than you could to work on a Java project"

reading is dangerous

2009-03-17T00:42:00.002+08:00

cut my finger by a research PAPER??!! when i took it out from my bag.

hope my profs will be impressed with my sacrifice for his research.lol

>.<

depressing world

2009-03-11T01:35:00.003+08:00

nus exchange guy died in his hall suddenly
one saf doctor commited suicide
one ntu student fell to his death
another ntu graduate killed himself
...
...
and now a nus student is dying of leukemia =s

please read this webpage and help if you can.

http://blessxiaoou.net/notice/1.html

What's new pussycat? The dolphin who made friends with a curious tiger

2009-03-08T17:17:00.000+08:00

SO CUTE

What's new pussycat? The dolphin who made friends with a curious tiger

By Sarah Titterton
Last updated at 1:24 AM on 07th March 2009

Like a cat peering into a goldfish bowl, Akaasha the tiger cub is transfixed by a dolphin staring back at her.

Curiosity got the better of both Akaasha and Mavrick, a 14-month-old dolphin who's probably more used to a crowd of human faces gazing into his glass tank at a Californian theme park.

Staff were taking six-month-old Akaasha on her daily walk around the Six Flags Discovery Kingdom when she saw Mavrick, a 14-month-old Atlantic bottlenose dolphin.

Paws for thought: Mavrick and Akaasha have a close encounter as another dolphin looks on

The pair examined each other from all angles possible - then the dolphin blew an approving bout of bubbles towards the tiger.

Staff were taking Akaasha, who is a six-month-old female tiger cub, on her daily walk around the theme park when she noticed Mavrick, who is a 14-month-old Atlantic bottlenose dolphin yesterday.

Snout to whiskers: Their shared curiousity meant Mavrick dipped down to get a better view and Akaasha strained to get closer to the glass

Mavrick cocked his head as Akaasha strained to get closer to the glass, perhaps bewildered as to why she could not catch the scent of this strange new creature grinning at her from another world.

It may be the start of a beautiful friendship.

Nice to meet you: Mavrick blows an approving bunch of bubbles at the entranced tiger cub

Worklife balance in schools

2009-03-06T22:32:00.001+08:00

Worklife balance in schools

By Jane Ng

TEACHERS at Riverside Secondary have to get permission from the principal to stay in school past 7 pm or return on Saturdays to work. Most times, it is not given.

Mrs Sng Siew Hong, who oversees the school in Woodlands, says she wants to ensure her staff do not overwork themselves.

'My teachers have multiple hats to wear and they have a very challenging job. If there is not worklife harmony, they may get burnt out at the expense of the students,' she said.

Riverside Secondary was one of four schools which won the Manpower Ministry's Worklife Achiever Award last August.

The other three schools are Tampines Primary, Fernvale Primary and Republic Polytechnic. Riverside and Tampines shared their success strategies with 36 other schools on Friday, describing some measures they have put in place.

In all, 40 companies were honoured with the award, which aims to recognise employers for strategies they have put in place to ensure worklife balance.

Mrs Sng said she leads by example, making it a point to leave the school by 5pm every day.

if i manage to become the boss, i will also lead by example by leaving before 5pm. wahahahaa

Highest Impact in Computer Science

2009-03-05T16:59:00.001+08:00

Canadian Universities: Highest Impact in Computer Science, 2003-07

http://sciencewatch.com/dr/sci/09/feb22-09_2/

Ranked by average citations per paper, among Canadian universities that published at least 50 papers in Thomson Reuters-indexed journals of computer science & engineering between 2003 and 2007.

Rank	Institution	Papers 2003-07	Citations per paper
1	University of British Columbia	137	2.89
2	University of Toronto	158	2.82
3	University of Western Ontario	87	2.17
4	McGill University	86	2.13
5	Carleton University	116	1.72

Computer Science & Engineering: High-Impact U.S. Institutions, 2002-06

Ranked by citations per paper, among U.S. institutions that published at least 200 papers in Thomson Reuters-indexed journals of computer science & engineering between 2002 and 2006.

Rank	Institution	Papers 2002-06	Citations per paper
1	University of California, Berkeley	308	3.25
2	Stanford University	282	2.93
3	MIT	364	2.67
4	IBM	963	2.65
5	Georgia Inst. of Technology	251	2.49

U.K. Institutions: Highest Impact in Computer Science, 2003-07

Ranked by average citations per paper, among U.K. institutions that published at least 50 papers in Thomson Reuters-indexed journals of computer science & engineering between 2003 and 2007.

Rank	Institution	Papers 2003-07	Citations per paper
1	University College London	58	2.14
2	University of Edinburgh	96	2.06
3	University of Southampton	86	1.98
4	University of Cambridge	128	1.67
5	Kings College London	58	1.66

dead-end job

2009-03-04T18:23:00.000+08:00

fyp professor 2

2009-03-04T09:17:00.002+08:00

1/
if you've set your mind in AI, UBC has a bigger and stronger AI group and other things related to AI.

beyond JP, McGill offers limited choice. GD is good if you are interested in robotics.

i want to offer one word of caution, which i forgot yesterday. ask youself whether you are interested and excited about spending 5 years doing AI. the *wrong* answer would be that i want to do AI because i did it for my FYP. graduate school offers many opportunities. hanging on a tree befoe seeing the forest would be a pity.

look at other areas as well if you have interests in addition to AI.

2/
Vancouver is a beautiful sleepy town. if you are thinking about jobs in Canada after phd, Vancouver is not great choice. Montreal is in Quebec, which offers much better opportunites (worse weather, of course). you may think it doesn't matter as they are both in Canada. it matters.

3/
i am surprised you didn't get anything else from US... but if you still don't get more news in the next 2 weeks, the chance is indeed slim. the competition may be very strong this year, because of the economic crisis.

good luck!

fyp professor

2009-03-02T21:56:00.001+08:00

heard the news of a NTU professor being stabbed and i am very amazed by the lately spate of violence in singapore.

to be frank, i am fortunate enough to meet very great professors in my faculty. for instance, i emailed my professor and I asked him which graduate school i should choose. he sent a very long reply:

among the 3 choices you have, clearly the 2 Canadian schools are both better than Purdue. both DP and JP are excellent researchers. i can't think of anyone from Purdue that would match them, as far as AI, robotics, ... are concerned.

of the 2 Canadian schools, they are very close in terms of research strength. it's very difficult to choose. UBC and McGill forever argues who is the 2nd best in Canada. the best one is clear cut, Toronto.

UBC probably has a somewhat larger group in AI, robotics, computer vision. DP is of course a top researcher. he seems to have had very few phd students over his career. i don't know why.

JP is also great. you heard her speaking. she is very knowledgeable and articulate. comparing her with DP doesn't make much sense. DP is much more senior. JP did something really outstanding during her phd, but since then, i am yet to see something as good.

i think either one will be a good choice for research. you can consider other factors. Vancouver is a beautiful city and better weather. i never been to Montreal. i heard it has rich culture. McGill is english-speaking, but Montreal is Quebec, the french-speaking part of Canada. you've been to France. you may like it. btw, Quebec would have a more lively industry than British Columbia. but i suppose you want to come back to Singapore to work afterwards, this may not be an issue for you.

status

2009-02-24T18:01:00.002+08:00

waiting: Duke, USC, GA Tech, Toronto, Edinburgh, Waterloo
accepted with funding: Mcgill, UBC
accepted w/o funding: Purdue
rejected: MIT, Stanford, CMU, Cornell, UPenn, Brown,

U british columbia - accepted

2009-02-24T09:30:00.002+08:00

better stipend but the professor i wanted to work with just told me he's not taking in new students =(

----------

Congratulations and welcome to the Department of Computer Science at the
University of British Columbia! I am pleased to advise that subject to the
approval of the Faculty of Graduate Studies, you will be admitted to the
M.Sc. program beginning September 1, 2009.

The department provides financial support to incoming graduate students
without any scholarships or fellowships. Our financial support for our
M.Sc. student without support is:

Form of Support: Teaching and/or Research Assistantships
Amount of Support: $18,500.00 per year
Guaranteed Period: 20 months
Duties: combination of teaching and/or research activities
# of hours: based on an average of 12 hours-per-week

yishun steamboat

2009-02-22T15:55:00.001+08:00

it does feel quite scary knowing that I will be away in a foreign land alone for the next 5years of my life.

first full admit from Mcgill, canada

2009-02-19T10:07:00.002+08:00

but the funding is a bit pathetic. let's go speak Canadian french!

Dear Mr. Png:

We are delighted to let you know that we have recommended that you be accepted into our Masters program commencing in September 2009. Admission into this program is a highly competitive process and we congratulate you on this achievement! You will soon receive an official acceptance package along with any conditions of acceptance from the Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies Office once they have approved our recommendation (in your case, this is a formality!). Information on registration will follow.

We are also happy to inform you that you have been awarded a $9,500 entrance scholarship (this includes funds from the Provost’s Graduate Fellowship program as well as funds from the department) for your first year of study in our department. In addition XXXX has agreed to supervise you and can also offer you an additional $2,500 plus the cost of your tuition for the first year and $12,000 plus the cost of tuition for the second year (subject to satisfactory progress). In your second year, you will also be given the opportunity to become a teaching assistant, which would increase your income by at least than 2,000$ per semester. Additional funding may also become available from your supervisor.

i miss doing research

2009-02-16T20:37:00.002+08:00

haha, shit, i cant believe it, but i miss doing research. argh, i wanna do programming in C++ and read up on algorithms.

question: what's the difference between a science student and a computer science student?

1) a real science student goes to lab and wears his lab coat, while a comp. science student goes to the lab, wears his jacket and surf net.

2) like what chris always said, real men study physics/maths, pussies study comp. science. LOL

if i still don't get any offers by end of next month, maybe i have to consider doing a phd in NUS =s unfortunately the only thing that appeals to me is the table-foot in the graduate students lounge. lol

this week

2009-02-12T23:57:00.003+08:00

"kanna conned on tuesday"
"one rejection, more coming"
"meaningless existence"
"cant wait to quit"
"quit IT while u can"
"it sux to be poor"
"i need a lot of money"

enough said

loving obama

2009-02-05T22:58:00.002+08:00

first he acknowledged the importance of scientists..

"We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. And all this we will do."

and then he f*** all the bloody money suckers.

Obama, his vice president and chief spokesman all fired off statements voicing outrage after the New York comptroller reported $18.4 billion in 2008 bonus payouts at a time when taxpayers' money was shoring up a financial system in crisis.

"That is the height of irresponsibility. It is shameful," Obama told reporters while meeting new Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Vice President Joe Biden.

鱼 - 陈绮贞fish

2009-02-03T01:05:00.002+08:00

beautiful lyrics. no doubt she's one of the best female artists around.

陈绮贞-《鱼》

我坐在椅子上看日出复活

我坐在夕阳里看城市的衰弱

我摘下一片叶子让它代替我

观察离开后的变化

曾经狂奔舞蹈贪婪的说话

随着冷淡试戴浮华

带不走的丢不掉的让大雨侵蚀吧

让他推向我在边界奋不顾身挣扎

如果有一个怀抱勇敢不计代价

别让我飞将我温柔环绕

我坐在椅子上看日出复活

我坐在夕阳里看城市的衰弱

我摘下一片叶子让它代替我

观察离开后的变化

曾经狂奔舞蹈贪婪的说话

随着冷淡试戴浮华

带不走的留不下的我全都交付他

让他捧着我在手掌自由自在挥洒

如果有一个世界浑浊的不像话

原谅我飞曾经眷恋太阳

带不走的丢不掉的让大雨侵蚀吧

让它推向我在边界奋不顾身挣扎

如果有一个世界浑浊的不像话

我会疯狂的爱上

带不走的留不下的我全都交付他

让他捧着我在手掌自由自在挥洒

如果有一个怀抱勇敢不计代价

别让我飞将我环绕

原谅我飞曾经眷恋太阳

no demand

2009-01-25T01:26:00.003+08:00

An econs friend's remark: "you are obviously one of the best students from NUS, and yet you wouldn't be able to find a job in sg that required your skills. As i told you before, sg has no market for highly technical skilled workers".

Will I ever be part of a development team programming things like this one day?

procrastinate king!

2009-01-23T01:03:00.004+08:00

it's amazing how slack i can be. i realised i can be super efficient or super NUAH-sai(the new term coined in cambodia). the last 2 semesters were especially hectic, considering the efforts i put in for my fyp and the other CS modules. i am glad that my efforts paid off. it was quite anxious to check your results using a HP in cambodia, waiting for the sms to come and especially when your cap was at the borderline. i was quite worried that i might see a 4.49 CAP. hahaha.

amazingly, my cap improved by 0.1.

and these 2 weeks are my super slack week. i slept late, woke up very late and hardly did anything constructive. it's like an extended holiday from cambodia, vietnam and laos, haha

oh ya, i went for CSC day on last saturday and saw junhao. he's already primary six but he was still as childish as before. i showed him the photos of him and yongming i took 2 years ago but he told me he didn't remember yongming =.= in the end i took another kid called jasper, who was quiet at the beginning, but ended up chatting a lot. haha. shit man, i miss yishun. i also interacted with an old lady called Peter Jane, who was an indian, but kept telling me she liked chinese food and chinese television shows.

another useful thing i did was to attend 3 days of POM*Ps workshop at NUS. it's quite fun to see professors shooting questions at each other. and i found it interesting that even though there were some older professors who were notably more famous, the younger ones usually still dared to question what they said.

what else did i do for the past 2 weeks? ermm, i watched ci pi 2, which had a sucky plot, and IP Man. seriously, when i first saw IP man, i really thought it was intellecual property man. hahaha.

i will force myself to blog about cambodia soon. maybe i shall start with a video. hee.

Itinerary

2008-12-11T22:19:00.002+08:00

12th Dec to 30th Dec: Cambodia, leaving siem reap on the 30th

Vietnam
30th Dec to 3rd Jan: Reach Ho Chi Minh on 30th December(Night)
3rd Jan to 6th Jan: Reach Hanoi @ 1940

Laos
7th Jan to 10th Jan Vientianne

need to start training my fitness

2008-12-04T03:47:00.005+08:00

during my fyp presentation, a camera man actually came in and snapped a few photos and these photos were uploaded onto SOC page. lol. not bad, i have some photos for souvenirs.
http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/undergradprog/fyp/fypphotos.html

looks quite cocked leh. haha

i finally realise and admit that i'm on my way to middle age.
i wonder how much fat i put on during the 3.5 years of undergraduate man.

my face really looked fat here.

then i went to visit some of the old entries in my blog to try to find some photos for comparisons.
digital cameras weren't that common yet.

much thinner face... i just managed to find an old photo.hahahaa, i'm not the only one. changjie also put on so much weight after 3 years in NUS. hahahah

used to be quite fit b4 entering nus leh. wtf happened to me. issit becoz the only exercise i did in SOC is typing the keyboard

i need to start running 5km everyday to lose all the fats accumulated in the 3.5years hahaha.

and i'm hooked to the taiwanese drama show, Hot Shot.

graduation mood?

2008-11-29T22:12:00.003+08:00

i think i need an A badly for my fyp to pull up my last paper, haha, been slacking and not studying much for my last paper and it's a level 5000 module =s

know ur place in society if u r poor

2008-11-24T23:24:00.006+08:00

this is going to be a long and depressing post...

these three blogs (i actually have more!) basically summarize the reasons why it's bad to do engineering / IT in sg.so think thrice before you embark on a technical career here. this little island is only for civil servants, bankers, lawyers and doctors despite all the bullshit u hear and brochures you receive(just got a fancy one from DSO).

with only one paper left and one week to graduation, the chances of getting a post-grad seems slimmer and slimmer.. recently, i got to know that the senior from my lab was the 2nd top student in SOC, she did a Master in SMA alliance, did research assistant under my profs for 1 year before applying for post-graduate studies, and she only got 1 out of 7 places she applied. =s. compare her CV to a dick who has nothing but 2 years of NS experience??

even the applications itself make me feel how it sux to be a sgian. every country has some ways to protect their own citizens: US schools say that certain prestigious research fellowships are only for US citizens, canadian schools only admit very few international applicants, UK schools give scholarships mainly to UK citizens and europeans students. contrast this to a particular red dot that sponsors foreign 15 years old kids, let them have a free education in the university while the guys serve 2 years of ns and the girls join CCAs to get enough points to stay in hostels.

even for jobs, it's the same. i emailed a UK company for fun before and this is what the person said: if you don't already have a visa, we cant hire you because we need to show proof that we cant hire locals before hiring foreigners. lol. compare this to sg where i have heard of countless real accounts of companies hiring a singaporean so that they can hire 4 foreigners!

someone asked me why i'm so concerned about the money. my immediate reply was that it's the same reason why my mum saved up from her pathetic savings to make sure i can get an university education. unsurprisingly, given the fact that no one from my extended family has graduated b4, it's a big deal to her and my other relatives that i'm graduating, but frankly to me, i don't even feel like attending the commencement ceremony. i actually think it's a waste of time, hahaah. so ya, the reason why i want and need money is so that my future sons/daughters(if any) can have the opportunities to pursue whatever they want i.e being a musician, being a geek in some labs without having to worry about money. in other words, i hope my kids wun end up like a loser like me, whose only current goal in life is to get accepted by a post-grad program. lol

another friend commented that 'times are bad. ideals can come later'. how true is this statement and how depressing this sounds. how different are we from animals if our purpose in life is only for survival? whatever happens to the higher purpose of living?

my fate? it lies in the hands of a few selected ones in the admission committee. =s
.......................

just had my management science paper today at MPSH, possibly the last time i am taking an examination in MPSH(i hope so!).
i marked my MPSH finale by 'asking' the student besides me to stop looking at the exams questions when we were not allowed to do so! it's really damn annoying to see nus students doing things like that. argh.
and after the exams, i actually left my notes in the hall. hahaha, a friend commented that it's quite an ass to finish an exam and leave the modules materials in the examinations hall.

holiday mood

2008-11-19T22:32:00.002+08:00

attended a senior's wedding on saturday. wa, pple i know are slowly getting married =s

phew! my fyp presentation went on smoothly on monday.
hhaa, and i did the slides using beamer. good bye microsoft. documents can be typed using latex, graphs can be plotted using gnuplot and slides can be prepared using beamer. all of them create higher quality products.

i have been slacking on monday, tuesday and wednesday. waa. not a good sign. should i force myself to go library to mug tmr?

19more days

2008-11-13T23:56:00.002+08:00

it feels strange to have only 19 days to last paper.
next monday is my fyp presentation
next next monday is Management Science exam
next next next monday is Algos exam,

and that's the end of my NUS life!
=S

feels even more strange having only 2 examinations.

really in holiday mood now, haha

and i was so lucky yesterday too.

anyway, david showed me this funny lame clip

submitted

2008-11-05T23:33:00.004+08:00

today is an important day in history.

the day when America elected the first black president, and
the day when

i
submitted
my
fyp thesis!

all the hard work for the past 10 months, working in lab until 2 to 3am during the 3months holidays, nights implementing algorithms in the dreaded c++ programming language, days running experiments on servers, accidentally crashing the soc phoenix server once when i wrote a script wrongly, and i had to call the soc admin to help me restart the server, lol, weekly 3 to 4 hours meeting in the Adaptive Computing Lab in NUS, missing the deadline for ICRA, realising that grad students in my lab work until 3am at times..........

well, at least i have some fun.

http://www.ooogs.com/pngshaowei/factoredPomdps.pdf

done without any aid of microsoft products. i cant remember when was the last time i logined to windows on my laptop.

i think i have converted myself to become a latex user too.

presentation on the 17th and this will be my last time touching POMDPs. haha.
i'm pretty optimistic that the paper will be accepted by RSS conference, and even if i dun get into a post-grad program, i can say that i make some contributions to research in the Artificial Intelligence domain.

goner...

2008-10-29T22:05:00.001+08:00

(10:02:05 SGT) [sleepysnail] 39/8 last hope: my prof told me to pass my fyp thesis to him earlier
(10:02:12 SGT) [sleepysnail] 39/8 last hope: and he said he would take one week to read
(10:02:16 SGT) [sleepysnail] 39/8 last hope: so i passed him last week
(10:02:36 SGT) [sleepysnail] 39/8 last hope: today, i asked him "when can i get my fyp report back from u?"
(10:02:39 SGT) [sleepysnail] 39/8 last hope: guess what he said

(10:05:47 SGT) dingfeng is out of symbols: hahaa
(10:05:49 SGT) dingfeng is out of symbols: next week?

(09:59:42 SGT) [sleepysnail] 39/8 last hope: "ur report? ohh u can pass it to me tmr"
(09:59:44 SGT) [sleepysnail] 39/8 last hope: -____________________-

last hope

2008-10-25T01:02:00.005+08:00

this is one reason why certain places are not meant for humans to live in.

anyway, i got back my analytical score for GRE. not bad, i got 5.0/6.0 phew. That's probably the maximum score i can get.

FYP report due in 19 days

2008-10-16T01:07:00.003+08:00

and i only write a few pages so far. :S:S:S I need to write 55 pages

50 days remaining in NUS SOC...

i cant believe how fast time flies..

my friend suggested i keep a counter that records Num of Pages Wrote/ Days Left.

Currently, it is at 10(55)/19.

a very nice oldie heard over the radio

votary?

2008-10-06T17:12:00.003+08:00

i think my luck is a periodic function, and it's approaching the lowest point now.

took G*E this morning, and i decided to cancel the test scores after taking the exam. that is equivalent to not having sat for the exam -_- wasted like 200 dollars man. the 2nd verbal question was VOTARY. this word is not even in my word list that has 3500 words. siann. the first few questions usually decide the overrall scores because the test is computer adaptive.

votary
a. A person bound by vows to live a life of religious worship or service.

toooo bad i'm not religious. that's why god is not helping me!haha

now i'm resigned to the verbal 580, quantitative 800 scores. hope my analytical writing was okay. i'm still waiting for results

2008-10-04T23:33:00.001+08:00

so disappointed.

focus

2008-10-04T00:46:00.000+08:00

i should just concentrate on my fyp and stop daydreaming.

m i doomed?

2008-10-01T23:29:00.004+08:00

a friend sent me two links to discourage me from applying for a phd.

Interesting pay chart.

THIS IS YOUR EDUCATION, THIS IS YOUR SALARY


!
$50K!
!                                          **
!                                        **  *
$40K!                                      **     *    Any Questions?
!                                    **        *
!                               *****           *
$30K!                           ****                 *
!                       ****                      *
!                  *****                           *
$20K!             *****                                 *
!        *****                                       *
!     ***                                             *
$10K!  ***                                                 *
!**                                                     *
!                                                        *
0
+--------+----------+-----------+------------+---------+--*--------->

no       high       some        Bachelor's   Master's  Doctor
high     school     college     Degree       Degree    of
school   diploma                                       Philosophy
diploma

The average trajectory for a successful scientist is the following:

1. age 18-22: paying high tuition fees at an undergraduate college
2. age 22-30: graduate school, possibly with a bit of work, living on a stipend of $1800 per month
3. age 30-35: working as a post-doc for $30,000 to $35,000 per year
4. age 36-43: professor at a good, but not great, university for $65,000 per year
5. age 44: with (if lucky) young children at home, fired by the university ("denied tenure" is the more polite term for the folks that universities discard), begins searching for a job in a market where employers primarily wish to hire folks in their early 30s

But if i get a normal IT job in SG instead,

Once a person is admitted to a career track, it’s not clear that high IQ provides much additional benefit. In most career tracks compensation is more related to years of experience and not actual competency on the job. IQ may have little to do with promotions. The guy who gets along better with the person making the promotion decision is the one who will most likely be promoted. Higher IQ people may be less likely to get along well with their bosses because they are unable to hide how stupid they think their bosses are.

KNN. sounds like me. f****. i'm doomed no matter what i do..

struggle

2008-09-27T00:43:00.005+08:00

2 level 5000 modules + FYP + one other module + GRE is no joke. argh. i think i am falling sick due to the stress level. and mid term break is ending in a few days time! i hear that my french gang now nickname me as mister MIA. hahaha. actually now that i think about it, i'm that kind of person that if i never appear for outings for a few times, most probably you will never see me again. haha.

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

580/800 for verbal
800/800 for maths

not a very ideal score for verbal. sigh. i am retaking the exam a week later. hope i can get 620. final last shot man.

the interesting thing is that the exam is computer adaptive. so the questions will get harder if u get the answers correct and vice-versa. the maths questions became so difficult that i nearly couldn't complete the paper. on the other hand, i know i was doomed when the verbal questions got easier. haha. shit.

-----------

on a totally unrelated note, i also want a robot that looks like this

haha.

where is the light?

2008-09-22T23:48:00.003+08:00

sian, think i'm going to do badly for GRE. so many weird words that i have never seen in my life. i'm not p*c leh, i cant cram so many things into my small brain.

have you ever seen words like apothecary(druggist), panegyric(praise), peripatetic(walking around), prehensile, prolixity. ............

i recalled the book 1984(so freaky that i still remember the story haha) depicted a scenario where the number of words in the dictionary got lesser and lesser over the years, and the dictionary kept shrinking in volume. the reason was the ministry of truth removed words that might potentially be 'harmful' to the society. for instance, if you remove words like 'protest', 'human rights', 'democracy', 'justice', and nobody knows such words exist, there wun be any more demonstrations. haha, damn GRE.

i think hor, if i cannot get admitted next year, i will just drop the idea lar. i'm already 24 this year. if i get admitted 2 years later, that means i'm 26 when i commence and 32 when i'm done. if i do a post-doc, i will be 34 to 35 already. so unfilial for me to make my mum work until so old. =S

wish me good luck for my GRE this week.

2008-09-21T14:45:00.004+08:00

i need it badly if i want to get out of this place where innovation is worth nothing... there are very good explanations why there is no company that makes it big overseas. i dare to say CREATIVE(which is not creative at all) doesn't lose out simply because of bad marketing.

in the global world where innovation and creativity are valued, sg is badly lagging behind. to be frank, i don't foresee any changes in the next decade.

now i know i am not the only one who feels this way....

But being in a dumbed down environment seems to kill my passion in everything IT. I mean, even if given a chance to do what I want, I won’t want to develop cool stuff here, coz I don’t think anyone knows how to appreciate them. It will rot, just like that way the numerous progams written in the past 2 years are rotting. The ones sitting higher looks at $ (that’s ok), but only $ that comes in immediately (which is hard when you have a sucky branding) and recurring (which is even harder if you don’t feed an environment that constantly innovate); the middle management, whom if you think of it should have lots of IT experience already, still look at playing down technology in favor of having $ not leaking in anyway (except perhaps into their pocket). No one is going to appreciate me, should I take up “glorious” projects, even as simple and as marketable like converting a simple 2 tier architecture to a service oriented architecture. Oh please, SOA? That’s for kids / pre-sales talk.

However, in a technology backwater company, where innovation is the last thing they want to hear, while cost cutting measures are taken to the extreme, where social hierarchies dictates that the developers are at the receiving end of all negotiations, where hiring and firing are constant regardless of quality of people, as long as they agree to the low pay, where no innovation is allowed until the deal is done, after which promises always seem ridiculous in hindsight, and commitment drives us to engineer ourselves into a deadend, where business units fight amongst each other for customers, thus not leveraging any technology provided by one team from another. It's a miracle that the company is still alive, if it were to be situated in the silicon valley, I think it's probably gone. But still, all of these are expected, as I've learnt in year 2001. Nothing much have changed since, other than a few CEOs and the lost of all those Internet bubble money. I suspect it's a local culture thing, you know..

random

2008-09-20T01:21:00.003+08:00

heard this very old song over the radio

maybe life is happier if one learns to be more fickle-minded.

in some parts of the world, you get a day's sentence if you are rich and desperate to buy a kidney, but a 3 weeks's jail sentence if you are poor and desperate to sell yours. at the same time, you get a 3months sentence if you insult someone from the establishment, but a 6weeks' sentence if you attempt to kill a nobody. glad i m not a lawyer. heh.

=(

2008-09-15T14:25:00.001+08:00

> I discussed with David and Sylvie and we agreed that it's not
> possible to make the ICRA deadline (a few hours time). We should
> continue on it and try for IJCAI or RSS in January.
> Don't be too disappointed - it's the nature of research to be
> unpredictable. :)
> Thanks for the burst of hard work recently. We'll need to keep up
> steady work to get it done nicely by January.
>
> Regards,

customers r kings! not in sg though

2008-09-03T13:27:00.003+08:00

kevin bought a book from amazon. within a few weeks after he received his first copy, amazon sent him an identical book, apologizing for two missing pages in the book. he also received a complimentary voucher of $5.

i bought a textbook from NUS-Coop at $62.80. there were 2 missing pages as well. i had to go down NUS Coop to ask them, and what they did was to photocopy the missing 2 pages and gave it to me. no apologies, no voucher.. nothing.

excellent customer service in sg huh?
maybe i should start ordering textbook from amazon.

98 days more!!!

2008-08-29T00:32:00.008+08:00

98 days more to my graduation! waaa, 98 seems so short. sometimes i still find it hard to believe i'm graduating. secondary school days still feel like yesterday.

the workload for this semester is very heavy for me. even though i have 4 days week, i am taking two level 5000 computing modules. level 5000 modules are meant for graduate students, so i hope i wun do too badly for these 2 modules :S i remembered when i first stepped into 5206 algorithms lecture room, i was shocked by the number of pr*c in the room. haha, fortunately, a singaporean sat beside me, and now we are so glad to have each other. lol. he had a long dramatic story of how he got into a phd programme at UPenn, but he had to come back to singapore because he couldn't get his wife and child over to US with his visa. he told me that he was from civil engineering, and he did a master under NUS SMA, and then he realised he had a PASSION FOR PROGRAMMING. LOL. i wonder how most of the SOC undergrads would react to this. most of them cant wait to get out from SOC. another the interesting thing is that he is intending to do his phd under my fyp profs.

my GRE test date is 3 weeks later, and i must force myself to mug. there is a 3500 word list for me to remember. as you know, my memory kinda sux, so please encourage me to mug if u see me idling on msn.

some random photos. my yep team went down to NUS High to get the students to paint tee-shirts for our cambodia trip. overrall the response wasn't too good, but some of the paintings were fantastic.

LOOK at this!

INCREDIBLE right?

i signed up for AHM long ago, thinking that i have time to train during the holidays. but soon my knee started hurting after training, and i stopped running during the holidays. i went to see the physiotherapist in NUS, and she was damn professional. she said that the right side of my quadriceps was too tight, and after her instructions, i had no problems running again. so i didn't manage to train, and one week before the run, i just ran 5km, and another 10km 2 days before the run. i am amazed that i managed to complete the 21km AHM, even though the last 5 km was walking. lol

after the run, xyz even brought me for a free ride on the hippo tourist bus.

let me end off with a new scandalous photo from my yep team.

is this pair going to be the new yep couple?

DRAMA

2008-08-22T20:30:00.003+08:00

i doubt anyone has such a stressful and dramatic first 2 weeks of school.

incident 1:

took an easy gem during special semester, and i wasn't feeling well that day, and i buanged it badly. got a big fat C+ that pulled down my cap to 2nd upper. seriously i was like $@!%$@%$^$#^$!%@%$@%$@% . fortunately, the doctor from NUS helped me write a letter, and SOC staff helped me in my appeal. after a few days of distress, my grade for that module became Incomplete. PHEW.

incident 2:

on wednesday, my prc lab mate told me that he had registered for GRE. to apply for post-grad, GRE results are required. somehow i had this misconception that i can take GRE in december, and he informed me that GRE results would take 10 weeks to be sent, and the latest date i can take is in October. Futhermore, all the test dates were already taken up. waaa, and my only course of action is to go Malaysia to take exam. @$%!%$@%@!$%

so i ended up visiting that stupid GRE site, and clicking refresh on site continuously for the next 2 days, hoping someone would cancel his/her test date. Thanks to CY and HT who did the 'refresh' thing for me, i got a test date in sept. PHEW

incident 3:
someone asked me to take cz1102, which is a programming module in Science. since cors allowed me to bid, i just took it, and i dropped my management science module. to my horror, soc staff told me today that i was not allowed to take this module. moreover, i couldn't appeal to retake the module i dropped because it was too popular. waaa, so my afternoon was wasted on trying to find a module i could take. i gave up by night time, and after dinner, i received an email miraculously saying they had given me back my module. PHEW.

DRAMA or not???

what an exciting way to start this semester...

c++ question

2008-08-14T01:25:00.001+08:00

SparseTable* finalStateTable = &stateFunctionList[0].sparseT;

A)
finalStateTable = SparseTable::join(finalStateTable,stateFunctionList[i].sparseT); WORKS

B)
finalStateTable = &SparseTable::join(*finalStateTable,stateFunctionList[i].sparseT); DOESN"T WORK

WHY?

This is called the Bonehead Mistake.

SOLUTION:

SparseTable* finalStateTable = &stateFunctionList[0].sparseT;
SparseTable* finalStateTable2;
for (int i=1; i < stateFunctionList.size(); i++) {
finalStateTable2 = new SparseTable(SparseTable::join(*finalStateTable,stateFunctionList[i].sparseT));
//delete finalStateTable;
finalStateTable = finalStateTable2;
}

post-grad??

2008-08-10T00:28:00.004+08:00

i have been thinking about this since half a year ago, and I still have not reached any conclusion yet.

should i take the risk, and try to get a phd place overseas? this probably means 6 years of my life in a foreign land, and potentially my entire lifetime since sg is a bad place for research and high tech computing jobs. it is also times like this when i realise how disadvantaged i'm compared to non-sg peers who are 2 years younger than me. it also means pathetic stipend for many years ahead, and no guarantee that i can secure a good IT job commensurate with my qualifications in the future.

or should i be content with a IT job in sg? managerial positions should be easy to attain within a few years. working in a company also means that i do not have to care about work outside office hours. on the other hand, phd students often spend their weekends and late nights working on their thesis. if i put in similar amount of efforts in my future job, i think my boss will love like me deeply. haha. but seriously, i cannot imagine doing such insignificant IT sg job for my life.

i also wonder whether i'm good enough to be accepted by the good schools, and even if i get accepted, will i be good enough to pass their qualifying exams? why should i risk and embark on such a path filled with uncertainties? even the application process is tedious enough. GRE, testimonials, and an expensive fee of usd 80 for every school i apply!

perhaps success does have a price to pay afterall.

depressing

2008-08-08T00:26:00.000+08:00

i wonder why i deserve all these shit

facebook friends???

2008-08-07T18:20:00.003+08:00

what the hell are facebook friends?

so far, i have one guy and two girls adding me to facebook, and i have never seen them in real lives. nor do i have any common friends with them. when i messaged them asking how did they know me, they said they don't but they want to know more people.

am i out of touch with the society?

FFG!!!!

2008-07-30T10:00:00.002+08:00

School Of Computing
Undergraduate Online FFG Declaration System
Academic Year : 2008/2009, Semester : 1

FFG Declaration Confirmation Sheet
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
You had completed the FFG indication process.
Below is a generated report of your FFG selections.

Please PRINT a copy of this confirmation slip for acknowledgement purpose.
This report is generated at Wed Jul 30 10:00:08 SGT 2008 .

FFG Selections
Selected Degree Details Options
File for Graduation : Yes (for current semester)

(Please note that this is prelimary checking subjected to confirmation.)

reasons

2008-07-28T23:57:00.002+08:00

many many reasons, but this is the important one

quoted from

From the Straits Times on 24 July 2008:

Expect 'high leakage' of engineers

TRAIN more engineers and expect a 'high leakage' of these desirable talent into other industries, said Mr Philip Yeo.

It's inevitable because 'their skills of logical thinking and analysis can be applied to any field', he added.

Mr Yeo should know. An engineering graduate from the University of Toronto, he has held various public sector portfolios.

He was a Defence Ministry permanent secretary. He was also chairman and then co-chairman of the Economic Development Board from 1986 to 2006.

He was also chief of the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*Star), and is now the Spring Singapore boss.

He argued that engineers can easily cross over into finance, but not the other way round.

But what's happening today is that bright A-level students are heading into finance, an industry where he felt young people are 'grossly overpaid'.

He warned that the 'penalty will be felt years down the line'.

In contrast, Germany values engineers.

'It comes from a tradition in which you value people who can make and sell things.'

The solution: Reward engineers well, and make the industry attractive.

For now, a PhD graduate in mathematics can earn much more at a hedge fund instead of as a researcher, he said.

Singapore trains about 4,400 engineers a year at the universities here, he noted.

LEE SIEW HUA

Is the solution really to train more Singaporean engineers when more of them are crossing over to non-engineering sectors of the economy? When more people cross over, this means that the market doesn't really need so many engineers. Also, companies won't pay engineers more simply because someone says so, even if that someone is Philip Yeo.

The comparison with Germany is not really suitable. The kind of engineering jobs we have in Singapore are mainly the repetitive low-level technical types, those that can and will be outsourced to China. On the other hand, a good deal of those in Germany are those that involve tailoring the product for the customer. Those jobs in Germany require a great deal of technical proficiency whereas the ones in Singapore are mainly the Ctrl-C-Ctrl-V types.

Take for example, the field of electronics. Although Singapore has a large microelectronics industry, most of the equipment is imported from overseas. If a machine breaks, they'll just fly in someone from the US to fix it. Singapore doesn't make high-precision optics; countries like Japan and Germany do. Because most Singapore engineers don't make or design things like high-precision optics, they stand to lose their jobs in the next 5 years to some guy in Vietnam or China. On the other hand, German or Japanese engineers have a lot more job security because they perform precisely those kind of services.

Rather than increase the number of engineering graduates, I believe that better solution would be to cut the number of engineering graduates and instead, focus on improving the quality of the education and training engineers receive in Singapore. In Germany and many other European countries, engineers undergo a very rigorous technical training and their degree courses take 6 years. Competition to gain entry to engineering institutions is fierce and engineers are very well-paid. In Singapore, people with C's for A-level are dumped into the engineering schools of NTU in the mistaken belief that the more sub-par engineers we have, the better off we are.

unquoted

it is true. the same applies to IT in sg. jobs are mainly ctrl c ctrl v types, and the longer you are doing such jobs, the less value you have in this global world. and it is also true that european engineers are damn solid, especially if we compare them to students from local universities. how do i know? i studied with them during my sep. i'm pretty sure most of them can get a first class in NUS.

how to distinguish a native french speaker

2008-07-22T16:53:00.004+08:00

[sleepysnail] 137. python programmer conversion says:
waa
u mia for so long

Christopher says:
haha was in Italy
for the marriage of a friend

[sleepysnail] 137. python programmer conversion says:
u r speaking in french leh
pple usually say for a friend's marriage

Christopher says:
oh damn... f**k
Think my brain is now linguistically rewired
shit. not good
My ang mor is degrading

hha, this is what happened when a person studied in France for more than 6 years. "for the marriage of a friend" is literally translated from "pour le mariage de mon ami"

pom*dp

2008-07-13T10:33:00.002+08:00

http://motion.comp.nus.edu.sg/projects/pomdp/pomdp.html

i wonder if anyone understands what i am doing, but i think most probably no. haha

i should try to relax more. nowadays, the first thing that i think of when i wake up is how to proceed on coding for my project.

workaholic

2008-07-03T03:41:00.000+08:00

i realise i can be a workaholic at times, the time is 3.30am, and i'm about to leave my honours lab.

java junkie

2008-07-01T05:04:00.003+08:00

8pm.. notice a part of my code has some problems. trying to find out, but i gave up at 9pm. decided to do other things instead.

after hours of coding.......

notice the time..

(03:42:12 SGT) [sleepysnail] 157..: times like this
(03:42:22 SGT) [sleepysnail] 157..: makes me feel like dropping fyp!
(03:42:22 SGT) [sleepysnail] 157..: :S
(03:42:23 SGT) [sleepysnail] 157..: haha
(03:42:25 SGT) [sleepysnail] 157..: 3.45am
(03:42:27 SGT) [sleepysnail] 157..: -___-

saviour Chris to the rescue...

(05:00:40 SGT) Christopher: I think you have a missing -I path
(05:00:42 SGT) [sleepysnail] 157..: i think i found out why
(05:01:01 SGT) [sleepysnail] 157..: i notice that in A directory,when it wants to use POMDP class which is in B directory
(05:01:13 SGT) [sleepysnail] 157..: it writes using namespace pomdp
(05:01:17 SGT) [sleepysnail] 157..: -______________-
(05:01:20 SGT) Christopher: tsk
(05:01:26 SGT) [sleepysnail] 157..: wtf sia
(05:01:28 SGT) Christopher: Java Junkie

JAVA Junkie refers to programmers who are too used to java, and are incompetent in every other languages, like me. lol.

alternatives

2008-06-28T00:21:00.004+08:00

ahhhhhhh, there are two alternatives to my FYP headache.

1)

http://management.silicon.com/careers/0,39024671,39250909,00.htm

UK IT students are hiring coders in India to complete their coursework for as little as £5 a go.

A-level and university pupils are logging onto computer coding websites and farming out their work to foreign IT graduates.

Academics at Birmingham City University have detected 1,000 students cheating worldwide since they began monitoring the websites in 2004.

Lancaster said: "We have seen examples of whole final year dissertations being contracted out and submitted in stages to match when the work needs to be handed in.

THIS IS PERFECTLY WHAT I NEED MAN. SPLENDID!

If i am willing to fork out $10K, i can get 2000 manpower hours of work, and 2000hours = 200 days if a person works 10 hours a day. OMG, 200 days!!! that is >>>>>>>>>> my 160 days left!!!!

2) Procrastinate until the very last day and use an automated research paper generator like this:

http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/

SCIgen is a program that generates random Computer Science research papers, including graphs, figures, and citations. It uses a hand-written context-free grammar to form all elements of the papers. Our aim here is to maximize amusement, rather than coherence.

back to reality... 160 days more to graduation.....

gatherings

2008-06-23T00:57:00.004+08:00

this is a very very boring holiday for me. final year project is really an annoying thing, and is slowly sucking out any life remaining in me. also, i realise how inefficient i can be. even though i tried to do a bit of work each day, i often ended up distracted with online serials, facebook, msn chats etc. so i am getting more and more worried about my progress. hope i wun be f*** by my prof during this week's meeting :S

so a few gatherings this week disrupted my very routine lifestyle. doing research is a very personal thing. beside the weekly meeting with your prof, you basically don't need to communicate with anyone else. being used to this lifestyle, i feel quite strange and weird to be interacting with so many friends within one week. but frankly, i enjoyed it, and i guess even i need some human interaction once in a while. sigh, next week i will revert back to my boring ~~loner~~ lifestyle.

udders ice cream cafe, near novena square. i think this shop was relatively new, and the owner allowed us to try almost all the different varieties of the ice cream before we ordered. the portion was big too. some board games were also provided for customers. nice place.

june's birthday in june. rich girl!!! every year, her parents brought her to different countries to celebrate her birthday. last year, she went greece, and this year she went thailand. michelle tay left her present in the NUH canteen, and she only realised it upon reaching city hall. -_- i'm sure she was infected by lynn's blurness during our London trip.

i think i look like xiao bai nian after spending too much time in my lab. desmond and even june look more tanned than me.

june said she wanted to go shoduku. i thought she wanted to try the food there, but actually she had been there 3 times already. anyway, we all know that mark is a nice guy. haha

mayi's 22nd!!!

why is she blowing candles that r not lit up?

presented included starhub vouchers, and a pharmacist mug. it is funny that mayi's pharm friend actually went to the same starhub shop, and the sales person told her that they don't sell vouchers.

also, Dr Chan TT doesn't know how to go to settlers from the MRT even though we were there last year. mayi's limited vocabulary actually helped her team mates guess the word 'limited'. haha

TT and ritchie made a personalized card for her, but she looked like she was tic-toe-ing rather than jumping.

happy 22nd birthday mayi!

my most unglam photo

2008-06-16T00:51:00.003+08:00

i received an email from GSH this morning:

hey gongsai!! HAHAHa your manlihood's exposed in eugene's 27 aug photos... omg i cant stop laughing.

and so i went to take a look...

WARNING

this is NSFW(not safe for work):

a photo labeled 'bored dad and his 3 girls'

sorry to winghang for dirtying ur drumstick.lol

booo

2008-06-11T01:34:00.003+08:00

wanted to sleep early today, but i think i wun be able to sleep well tonight.

i had not emailed my french host since a few months ago. today i received an email saying that her daughter refused to let her and her husband see SAM, and they are now engaging a lawyer for advice. :(

i want my life back

2008-06-09T22:01:00.000+08:00

Time until Saturday, December 6, 2008 (Singapore time)
179 days
4297 hours
257879 minutes
15472742 seconds

http://www.timeanddate.com/counters/customcounter.html?month=12&day=6&year=2008&hour=&min=&sec=&p0=236

2008-06-09T00:53:00.001+08:00

miser.

2008-06-08T01:49:00.003+08:00

i have become a miser ever since i returned from sep. haha. before my sep, i told myself that i allowed myself to splurge during my travel trips, so that i could enjoy the good food in europe. i also told myself that i would start saving after my trip. lately, a friend told me that he had around 10% of a million in his bank acount now. waaa. he accumulated his money from teaching tuition during his undergraduate days. omg. no matter what, it is better to start being stingy since i'm going to graduate in hmm 180 days.

my old handphone battery's lifespan is only 9hours a day now. after delaying for over one month, i decide to buy a new phone. being a miser, my budget was < $80, and i decided get nokia6500 for $48. actually i wanted to get the samsung ultra 21 for $0 but it was sold out. the staff even got the cheek to say it was sold out in all the branches. i suspect the phone was already nearly sold out when they advertised it.

i finally force myself to arrange some of the sep photos. it is so troublesome to upload my photos. i have to upload onto facebook so that i can tag my friends inside the photos, and thus they can have a copy of the photo. however, to upload photos onto my blog, i have to upload them again on bubbleshare. argh. furthermore, facebook limits one album to 60 photos. how annoying.

my life is getting more n more boring. but lately, i am volunteering in the meet-the-people session near my house. i find it disturbing to see families with combined monthly income of less than $1.5k, and i wonder how do these people survive in singapore.

damn lucky for Artificial Intelligence module

2008-06-03T01:29:00.003+08:00

the examination for this module didn't go well as expected. i wasted too much time on the easy questions because it was my first time doing such questions(never did the tutorials -_-). i ended up having no time for the harder questions.

for this module, the results for the examinations were released, after looking at the average scores and standard deviation, i know that i am probably in the borderline between A- and A.

and i got an A!

email from prof:

Quite sure you just messed up on your Final Exam and so I panchan a bit - but, a lot of people did much worse, so it's not altogether true that you didn't deserve it. You were at the borderline where I could give either A or A- (i.e. the guy after you got an A-) and I decided to be kind. Sometimes you get lucky. :-)

what's the best-paying job?

2008-05-30T00:15:00.001+08:00

nope. not investment banking, not the finance industry, not doctors, not lawyers...

BUT....

private tuition.

my friend earned 20k this month from tuition!!! this included phone consultancy for a rate of 60dollars per hour.

i miss reading period???

2008-05-29T00:19:00.005+08:00

i finally blogged again!

dear friends of mine who purchased laptops during nus matriculation fair, the 3 years' warranty is up, and it's time to repair your laptop. 2 weeks ago, i went down ibm to tell them i have problems with my dvd-burner, and the lady told me that my warranty is actually on-site, so i could have called their hotline, and someone would come down my house to repair for me. being already at ibm, i asked her,'can i just repair my laptop here since i'm here already?'

guess what she said? 'yes, u can,but you have to wait 3 days to get your laptop. if you repair here, and you want your laptop by today, you can pay for our express service at $30+++. alternatively, if you call our hotline, we will send someone to fix your laptop within a day'. lol, these are the strange things that i can never understand. hahaha.

so now, i have a new dvd burner, new fan, and even new battery. haha. and last year, i changed lcd screen and adaptor. so beside my keyboard,mouse and motherboard, every part of my ibm is basically new.

waiting for the next matriculation fair to buy macbook..

--------

last week, i took delf b2 exam. really shit, becoz i knew my french standard wasn't b2 standard yet, and i am praying for a 5/25 for the listening part. sian. time to brush up my french. actually i think taking up french classes is the best way to improve french, but i have this feeling that i will pay the school fees, but end up skipping lessons due to other committments.

n my french gang went to watch Nim's island after the exam. i fell asleep in the cinema. -_-

----

addicted to this song on my itouch. i realise people like me shouldn't own an ipod/itouch. i am too lazy to go online to download new songs and albums, and thus i only have these same old songs on my player. getting sick of them liao. so sometimes, i am so sick of these songs, and rather listen to podcasts downloaded from bbc instead because they will download automatically everytime i open itunes.

----

and i have been feeling so tensed up ever since my examinations ended. seriously i think the reading period is the most enjoyable period ever since i came back from sep. my daily routine included me waking up at 10 to 11am, having brunch, reading notes/surfing net, facebook, watching video, and then dinner. waa, life is so simple man, nothing much to worry. now i have to fret over my fyp again. sian