Unknown

As mentioned, who reads this blog anyway? But hell I don't care, as long I have a source to vent out everything I dislike/like, it's good enough for me. The FYP rework is inching closer to it's dateline, after all we only got 4 weeks but I'm at a loss of what to do. Not knowing how to edit the codes on the spot could very well launch an immediate failure.

My other team mate is trying his best but he's not good at programming, and quite worse than my plight, he does not know the basis of database.

Sometimes I just want to chuck everything out of the window and just go away. When is NS coming...?

Monkeys?

"We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true"

I just love this quote, bah I'm so tired...

Life's Good

One week ago, I was only pouring out my agonies of my life and complaining of impending dooms around the corner. And yet as quick as they came, they left without a trace too. My first worry was about my first science UT and I was freaked totally - not because I did not study but rather on what to anticipate during the UT. I know for science, open-ended questions was the norm due to the preview of the quiz questions. Luckily, I seek a consultation of a good SAS friend and now at least, I'm at peace and know what to do.

Thank you Mei Yin!

Next up was my FYP rework crisis, as if the rework was not scary enough I had to worry what kind of supervisor I might get next. And I was in for a big surprise - the supervisor is so cool! He's ridiculously straightforward and friendly, able to settle what he and the group members want and the project details, all that with a good sense of security and easiness. While it's usually difficult for people of different age groups to click, I'll say this is the total opposite. A few members who were supposed to turn up well...did not turned up so Joshua (The supervisor's name) wanted to propose the suggestion to the head if it was possible for our scope to be reduced!

See that's so cool! Any boring supervisor probably think it was not their problem already.

The only ironic ending to this weekend is that, my brother caught Hand Foot Mouth Disease. Blame him for bringing back an item which was his friend's friend, who just so had contracted the same illness. And now my younger sister can't stop walking around the whole house with a bottle of Dettol.

My house has the scent of Dettol now as well, this is just odd. Everything's a blessing in disguise, even the disease.

Explosion

Standing in the spot where ten nuclear explosions are set to collide won't even come close to explaining how I feel right now. I only been hit with three bombshells today and I'm already on the verge of shock and collapse.

Bombshell # 1 - Today was the start of the rework, and I got the it through mail today. But can you imagine how much I was hyperventilating when I read the meeting date.

"17 Sep, Wednesday 12pm - 1pm"

And what time did I read this mail?

"17 Sep, Wednesday 4pm"

Before I started screaming in my head, I realized there was an after-mail that the meeting was postponed to this Friday. Oh for the love of...

Bombshell # 2 - I met an old secondary school friend, well in fact we have been meeting all our lives almost every morning on the covered walkway which links the bus interchange to the MRT. But we would always meet while heading for different direction separated by a crowd of people. Today was no exception but it was in the afternoon, and I think he actually realized it was me (being botak and all), because all the while in the morning we met, I was told he's quite sleepy so he's not that conscious of his surroundings. Being the typical shy bastard I was, I just looked straight after my eyes saw him.

This is why I hate my personality, anyone I know whom I never come across for quite sometime and especially if there was a great deal of time we did not even have conversation, it would be even awkward for me. I wonder how people react to long time friends/classmates they have never seen or interacted with...

Bombshell #3 - It finally came, the NS medical checkup, actually this isn't a worry to me but I thought I should include it anyway. After all, it's just two years of non stop physical grinding - beats any day of doing coding ugh...

I need to de-stress, back to games.

Away From Me

Already the second week of my elective science module, while I'm delighted with my progress and the knowledge of new biological concepts but the "enthusiasm" of my facilitator just makes the whole lesson die. It's not that he's that bad, but he is simply...well words fail me - even my IT modules, it's much lively in there even when I cannnot comprehend. I also worry about how to cram so much concepts into my head and remember them, I was warned that the UT questions are all open ended and often in loopholes.

I'm quite attached to this particular picture I found on the Internet, I'm not exactly sure why but I can relate to it. We all relate to a lot of things we just don't see a connection to at first touch, and obviously, I'm not the couple. And if you think I'm putting myself in the shoes of the soldier guys and you're wrong too, go interpret this picture according to you but I got my own.

Enough about me, me and me, we got to focus our attention on Mother Earth now! I watched an interesting documentary 'A Global Warning?' over the weekend, and it highlights a lot of things about the global warming issue we are encountering right now but are in denial - well at least to the people who want to avoid making a loss in profits for their economy. The folks really went way back to gather weather pattern data and such to try to make out what our future is going to be like and what are we exactly in for if our ignorance continues. Apparently, this was the summary:

The global temperature is rising and they're trying to find the main culprit, so check these suspects out.

1) The world has the bulk of the greenhouse gas, Methane, stored as Methane Hydrates under the ocean floor and due to the warming of the seas, they risk being broken down and escape to the atmosphere as gas. While not only do they trap heat, can you imagine if one day when a lightning storm occurs in an atmosphere stuffed full with Methane? We're talking at the scale of a nuclear explosion...

2) While volcanoes also spew out greenhouse gas (a lot actually), rarely do we have too many of the culprits - the supervolcanoes lying around. There is currently one situated at USA, the Yellowstone and it's told that it's 50 years overdue for an eruption.

3) Carbon dioxide, nothing beats the world's popular pollutant like they can. While this is a natural occurring gas in the atmosphere, providing plants as a source of material for making food, too much is actually a bane to everyone. Like methane, it traps heat but of course while Methane is more effective in trapping more heat but we have Carbon Dioxide at an uncontrollable amount in the atmosphere right now.

You can thank the countries that spew out this pollutant daily from cars, burning or fossil fuels and crazy energy demands.

4) Sunspots can cause much irregularities to our global temperature too, but currently the Sun is doing fine with it's sunspots so moving on...

5) Comets - when was the last time we were hit by one? This is one of the agents that can cause a sudden breakout in temperature and climate control but when was the last time such an event hit us? There was a theory somewhere in the timeline, this was supposedly responsible for a sudden eradication of 95% of life on Earth but they still lack proof to support this theory.

6) Our ice, which acts as a natural heat reflector is slowly disappearing and converting into water. Arctic, Greenland, Antarctica as long there's ice, you name it. Because oceans are dark in colour, exposing more of them means absorbing more heat rather than reflecting heat. Also there's the rise in water levels and endanger/extinction of particular animal life (polar bears). Permafrost at Alaska is also melting which dangers the fact of not only causing huge sinkholes, they also exposed dead plants beneath them which when bateria acts on them - causing more Methane as a byproduct to enter the atmosphere.

7) Of course, there's also not forgetting crazy climates - Hurricane Katrina, what more can we say?

It's not hard to tell that human activites are the cause for this impending disaster, but rather than pointing fingers now, it's better to try to think up a solution fast because we're running out of time. While "The Day After Tomorrow"'s weather effects sound a bit far-fetched, some of them are likely to come true. As the closing of the documentary asks...

"What will it take for us to finally wake up and realize it?"

Good Failure

Grades.

At RP, it's always standard to issue grades with comments to the team and individual. For my science module at least, this facilitator has a habit of reviewing the class before giving the grades.

"It is my practice to give a brief review after I publish the grades the the problem.

This class has very good potential to do very well for this module. Considering many of you do not have a background in biology, the effort put into the work is commendable. After a few more weeks, with more familiarization, the grades will naturally improve if the consistency is there.

In general, good work. For the 3rd meeting, there was very good coverage of content, as well as the demonstration of the basic understanding. Keep up the motivation to do well and you all will gain alot from this module."

And this is only the comment for the entire class, considering that to the 95% of the class, this was their elective. It went to team comments next...

"Good tie back to the problem statement. The presentation was detailed and in depth, with good illustrations which is commendable. At the same time, the rotation of presenters is a little imbalanced. For the next problem, perhaps this team can try to even out the presentation so it does not seem too imbalanced. Other than that, an excellent work."

Before I even move on, please note the insatiable usage of the word "good". Either we were really that good, he was running out of vocabulary or this was just to make us feel better if we actually didn't do as "good" as it was supposed to be. Finally it came to individual comments...

"You're a bright student and with more effort and participation and contributions in all 3 meetings, you will do very well. You shine during the 3rd meeting, presenting pretty well and demonstrates your understanding. I look forward to seeing the development of milestones over the next few weeks. "

Sounds promising and inspiring isn't it? But guess what I got...

C+. (Actually, in the grades itself it was a C, but considering it shouldn't be possible to give grades with a +, he probably had to mention it externally)

Now someone please explain the rationale to me with the neverending usage of "good" and also how the fact that the comments are actually helpful in improving you. I don't mind if I had areas which I need to improve, but the action behind the comments is ironic.

Oh well, Mei Yin warned me about him...

The Fall of the Giant

I can't believe why I actually forgot to blog about this yesterday, it was big news if you were an avid online gamer. Ever since August, MapleSEA has seen a rise in unexplained hackings of it's player's accounts, sometimes mesos or items go missing, worst cases would be both disappearing and your acash (if you had any left in your account) either spent as well, or on meaningless items. One player for example found a pig's head cash item in his account.

Well the point is anyway that Asiasoft kept mum on a lot of things and kept assuring the players everything was under control. When rumours surfaced that that were hacked and stuff, they only tried to do damage control and reminded it's players on cyber security. Some of the more popular reminders are...

1) Don't share your password or account information with anyone but yourself
2) Refrain from visiting websites that you are unsure of, they might contain trojans, keyloggers etc
3) Don't play at cybercafes and you may not be sure how up-to-date their anti-virus softwares are (or worst, they don't have one)

Unfortunately, majority of the victims are people who have followed about 100% of the rules, even the low profile players aren't spared from the hackings. Theories and finally a solid logical explanation were posted in the forum about the spate of hackings. One of the theories about using IGNs to hack due to a database leak proved it's truth when the ranking board at MapleSEA was taken down. Not much of an action was done, and the management was quiet other than highlighting their reminders incessantly. They even went as far as to disabling the create account/change password functions to prevent hackers from doing their work, but this also put the current players at risk because their data reminds the same and if the hacker could cracked their accounts, it's game over for them.

Finally the saving grace - http://www.todayonline.com/pdf_open.asp?id=1109HNR003

Unfortunately, the report wasn't exactly 100% accurate on whatever information the players provided. Yeah it's only due to a combined effort of players this was finally able to make it on the news, but bleh at the other big newspaper who refused to publish about it. This newspaper report proved a few things:

1) Asiasoft finally admitted they were under a hacker's attack, took a report to weed this out of them
2) The public knows about Asiasoft's reactions and actions taken to this crisis
3) Maplestory is Asiasoft's biggest pillar

I mean take a look at the previous once existent games Asiasoft was hosting, PangyaSEA and KongKongSEA. KongKongSEA was shut down because of a poor player base, I have not much to say but the decision was almost sudden. Then almost out of nowhere, PangyaSEA had to shut down too because of a poor player base reason as well. This I really have to vent it out, Pangya may have a low player base but it's certainly stable with players forking out money regularly on a-cash. It's a game that's relaxing because there is little grind factor, nice community, great potential in the game and most importantly - this game had rarely any lag/rollback/hacking issue which MapleSEA had the most!

Of course, it's obvious Asiasoft gives more shit about it's profits and Pangya went away too. Look at Japan's Pangya, it's obvious the game is thriving very well there. Now that Asiasoft's...actually Moneysoft is a better name, main pillar is collapsing, it's desperately trying to save it. I really want to almost mock that they think they're being hacked by China hackers. Whatever they claimed were based on the discussions and theories by the players in the forum, hell even some of the players managed to draw out the database leak theory earlier than they did.


Haha, look at the drop in players they had based on the hits of their website. It's obvious that it's showing a decline in popularity. And it's also obvious that when all this hacking saga is over one day, there will never be compensation as the loss is overwhelming so they are going to make up with what - more free 2 hours 2x exp/drop rate events?

*Explodes into uncontrollable fits of laughter*

I'll just watch slowly how this giant who makes millions a day from selling Prepaid cards fall to bits and pieces, hell I'm so merciful I'm not going to even talk about their lousy customer services.

Vocaloid

I'm probably gonna be a bit freaked out by air conditioners for a while, today's Network and Data Center Management saw a little field trip to Republic Polytechnic's own data center (2). We weren't allowed to go to data center 1 apparently because the LEO servers and the important servers are hosted there, one little tweak and you could bring down the whole school.

Apart from doing our interviews session with our facilitator regarding the data center, it was obvious to note that the climate in there was ridiculously cold. Those without long pants, jackets and shoes were really in for it of course, even with a thick jacket I could barely keep out the cold. You can literally hear the air conditioners roaring, and with the door swung opened (we were in the staging area before the data center), there was an invisible surge of freezing air. After the end of the cold trip, I felt a brain freeze effect even without the need of eating ice cream. Well enough about school, I'm quite psyched up today because a msn buddy of mine introduced me to Vocaloid! (To be precise, it's actually Vocaloid2)


Seen here is actually one of the characters from the Vocaloid2 Character Series, Kagamine Rin/Len (鏡音リン/レン). Vocaloid is actually a singing synthesizer application software developed by Yamaha Corporation that enables users to synthesize singing by just typing in lyrics and melody. They soon started Vocaloid2 and set up part of the character series with Japanese voices, which were obviously a bigger hit. I haven't seen any of the English voice characters yet or heard their voices yet so I won't say anything. The amazing thing about this is that the voices incorporate some elements from sample voices by real people and the rest is history, the developers are slowly moving away from imitating real voices to creating characteristic vocals though. So in short - most of the vocals you hear sound a bit like an idol singer from the future, but the truth is they don't exist.

Really reminds me a lot of Gorillaz and Daft Punk, they function almost in the same way except Vocaloid2 makes use of only a sample voice and from there onwards, it's all non-existence vocals. Kei's the awesome illustrator behind the creation of the twins and another character Hatsune Miku (初音ミク). Enough with the words, let your ears sample some awesome recommendations!

Hatsune Miku - Setsuna



Kagamine Rin/Len - ココロ・キセキ




I'm truly addicted and blown away by their voices, ココロ・キセキ has instantly become one of my favourites. The title translates to "Heart・Miracle", it has a really sad storyline with an awesome and equally touching PV to boot. According to the Vocaloid2 website, there's an upcoming new character, his name is Kamui Gakupo (神威がくぽ, Kamui Gakup). They're still in the midst of designing his character though, but it's slated to come out this year.

To the one who introduced me to Vocaloid2, I thank you! :D

Biology not boring

This is screwed up, there's obviously a lot of things being squashed at the bottom but ignore it for now because I'm still my best to fix it (technically speaking, trying my best to look for help). At least it has a tagboard now so yeah, better than nothing.

Nowadays I often come back home ending up shagged, I hardly can even go do a decent web surfing without drooping in front of the keyboard. Now with the FYP load coming in, it's becoming more intense now, so I'll definitely treasure my day-offs. Probably sleeping the day away and...just sleep more.

I just love my new elective module, Anatomy and Physiology but unfortunately, the facilitator isn't that as thrilling. While it's too early to pass any judgement, but the first impression is that he gives a very "sian" feeling and it's damn addictive. And because my class is mostly made up of people who aren't from SAS (which means for most of them, this is an elective too), it made him come up with a statement:

"Oh since most of this class are taking this as a elective means I can slack too,"

While this is taken in good fun, I seriously hope he doesn't mean it. I won't judge the book by it's cover, but I hope the contents of the book won't further compliment the book's cover.

My classroom, oh man...I miss the old school classrooms we had in Year 1 and 2. Always opened by the time you arrive at school, relatively warm temperature (unlike those damn accursed laboratory classrooms where the aircon really goes wild) and the best of all...soft snuggly spinning chairs! Makes a good choice for snoozing in class during breaks, the current chairs I'm experiencing in my other three modules are literally back-breaking. But the classroom which is situated at the E4 block is not only far from the entrance and the canteen, it's eerily quiet. We get plenty of sunlight here though so it's not that spooky, I supposed it's conducive to study too.

At SIT, a breakout can ensue chaos within it's corridors of the classroom.

Doing 10+ slides filled with words, diagrams and more words is just epic. You also have to elaborate to prove that you understood whatever you just rambled about. And oh, we had lab session today, but it's not really lab because all we did was to sit around and discuss about what we found out, and looked at some what is supposed to be cells from a rat's intestines. The lab was very very cool to hangout in, nice window view as well but too bad we're just gonna drop by in it for two more weeks. This module is very theory based after all.

Today's lesson is so interesting, we had to compare the human body to a house. /sacarsm

I also learned something random today - if you want to tell someone they're fat nicely, just say this:

"You have a lot of adipose tissues"

Just pray that they don't do biological sciences.

Addiction

You claimed you quit, you swore you want nothing to be done with this again. You said it ruined your life and wasted your money. Sure, so you did stop craving it and doing it again - but what's this? You have returned to your old habit again.

Old habits die hard? Psh, takes only a wimp to back out from his promises.



Oh shit...Granado Espada is so addictive. Quitting this game seems hard especially since there aren't any good games around. The most I just promise I won't spend anymore money on it...

Yeah right bastard..

Second perspective blogging, what fun.

Backtrack

I let my day go past unnoticed and forgotten too many times, this may the reason why I'm quite compelled to update this blog almost daily. It's not I don't have a life or anything but I want to get started before it's too late again. Looking back, my first blog looks quite childish, written in an embarrassing Mickey x Minnie design paperback. As a kid, I didn't find any use for a diary.

Diary's such an embarrassing name, really...

Tossed away into the depths and later converted into an autograph book. (Yes, those were the times!) I later seeked comfort in another book with some silly cartoonish design. Because I was quite a runt back then, I often had conflict with people back then and I believed that the book was like a source of venting of frustration and writing revengeful stuff about people I offended. We all do silly things when we're young, I have to admit that was one of mine.

Years past and my education upgraded to secondary school, that was when writing your thoughts alone became all the rage, otherwise known as blogging. Blogspot was considered almost an unknown to me; or at least, it was hard to code a layout. One of the things that constantly bug me about blogging is that...I can never blog in peace with a messed up layout, not sure how many may share that kind of sentiments but it's like asking you to jot down the personal details of your life in mud.

Wrong analogy maybe...but moving on.

One of my best friends (OMG best friends! Such a rarity in my life that'll forever be treasured~) Sandra, introduced to small group of us bloggers-to-be diaryland. I like how it appeals to first time users, as well as to users who played around with HTML/CSS for the first time but the name forever bothers me. My first blog was a memory, basically just describing my secondary school life in simplistic sentences and internet speak. (I reserve 'lol' and '1337' to msn nowadays)

Check it out - http://sinfilion.diaryland.com/ (6 Jan 2005~12 May 2007)

The skin's an interesting concept by a blogskin designer that old discarded blogs should also have a nice skin, either indicating the new blog link (well mostly this) or a blog is closed forever. This skin unfortunately cancels out majority of the links, as a result, even if you see an archive link, clicking it only allows you to see the title of entries and no more than that. I never wanted to see the entries again for some odd reason, but I suppose when I'm way older I might go back to take a look. This was still a hotbed of good memories though.

Afterwards I moved on to wordpress, more cleaner and organizer themes to impress. As you can see, there was a one month span in between the two blogs where I stopped blogging a while. But as the whole world was blogging around me, I can't stop either - peer pressure haha.

The second link - http://larg.wordpress.com/ (18 June 2007~7 Dec 2007)

I still think although the writing is more mature this time, it's still a collective base of junk entries which I also don't bother to read but with a different reason. In the end I moved up to game blogging which was a short lived success, well because I quitted the game I was blogging.

So it was pretty much a whirlwind of mind before I stop and came back to blogging once again. This time...well I have no idea actually. Just blog whatever comes to the head, that's the philosophy now. So what's your blogging philosophy? :)

A little song to tag with today's entry, subtle but fitting.



Mental note to self - need to setup a tagboard.

Minimal

Mini foreword: This entire blog is still under construction, still got loads of stuff to configure, so don't mind if you see any weird stuff around the layout etc.

Would love to slap myself silly for today's performance, it's only the second day of school (yet the last day of the week, I'm blaming Friday for this) and I'm already dozing off in class. I blame too many things but hey, I have legal reasons too. It seems like I only had two members in my team (inclusive of me) and I virtually had nearly zero experiences with handling the practical process. The other guy in my team was from IT security, he told me Internet Server Technologies is actually his elective module.

Lots of familiar faces in my class today as well, but I supposed that's one of the impending barriers today. I really don't know how to communicate with people, and I suck more at trying to face/communicate with people I have met before. Lack of topic enables me to be able to keep mum even if people try to initiate conversation. The facilitator, Bernard is a very cool guy though, not really intimidating as a facilitator so getting adapted to this class was no sweat.

Another thing that was bothering me today (or at least forever) was my fyp; I thought the work my group had done for the initial introduction of research topics for G302 could ease some of my worry. 11.45am we met up, one of my members Winnie couldn't make it due to a last minute clinical appointment. 12pm, no sign of facilitator at all.

Sent an email, no reply.

Called up his RP staff number, unavailable for contact - "Please leave a message", frankly I never bothered with answering machines.

We got stood up in the end, by 12.30pm I dismissed everyone. Seriously shagged today, the third meeting was not at all fun as stated in the front of the post. Only have two more modules on Monday and Tuesday and I seriously hope everything goes well. RP made a tweak to the facilitators assigned, apparently for my elective, I was said to have gotten an extremely good facilitator who was quite dedicated to the class. But in the end it got changed, I asked around and was feedbacked that my new facilitator is kind of biased and gives really undesirable grades. there are only two possibilities to this:

1) due to the performance of the students

2) the facilitator has too high of expectations

Don't know which but there can't be smoke without fire.

First day went well, why can't the rest of the days? Oh by the way, it rained this morning. What a foreboding omen even though I enjoy rainy days.

EDIT: Turns out the supervisor didn't receive a confirmation email of the date he proposed so he thought we weren't free that day! o_o

First Day

Oh who cares whether the layout is up yet, I think I had enough of my mundane yet exciting enough life passing me by and god knows if I can still remember any of them when I want to. School started today after a duration of three weeks, luckily for me it was not foreign because about half the class consisted of my year 2 classmates. No awkward moments or anything, my group was rowdy and I'm still getting to know people's names. The facilitator, Dale was briefed us on his rules and etc but he can be good fun too if we abide by them.

As usual, I have caught his attention by being a wee bit quiet during second meeting, running almost out of things to say.

"Cannot be quiet, I will target specifically the quiet people a lot!"

Really have get over this edge, this is one of the bane of my life, but otherwise the rest of the day went by quite smoothly, managed to give a lengthy elaboration during presentation. Still I think some of my classmates were hinting that I was boring the class, took some notes about that. My monotone voice doesn't exactly help my situation either but heck...all for the grades.

Midway during noon, had to scoot off to attend a fyp rework briefing because well...I failed my G301 module. Now after the briefing, it's just hell all over again, it's a bombshell of a nightmare .

1) You will be assigned a new project depending on which grade category you fall in, but there are only two grade categories which makes two projects.

2) Team members will be assigned, and how many in the team depends on the list of people who want to rework.

3) Code-on-the-spot is definitely going to part of the evaluation and the crux of the main project. If the individual fails to accomplish this during the evaluation, the evaluation is said to have no need to continue further.

4) D/D+ grade people have 2 weeks to complete their project along with 5 pages of documentation per member, while E/F grade people have 4 weeks to complete theirs with at least 15 pages of documentation. The entire project has a smaller scope but it is still a compressed version of 13 weeks.

5) D/D+ people can choose to rework based on their overall gpa, E/F people definitely have no option to not rework unless they want to spend another semester just to complete a G301 project (which will be 13 weeks this time round).

6) The maximum best grade you can get this time round is C.

7) For D/D+ people, you can actually try to be funny to try to do a rework but try to slack all the way to get a worser grade. But in the end, the your original grade will still be counted in assuming your new grade is lower. (If you do this, it only reflects on your asshole attitude :P)

In short, I'm screwed. Second chances but this is like sitting on a one way trip to doom. I'm pretty sure the D/D+ people who initially wanted to rework got put off of the idea after attending the briefing, at least I know one friend did. I'm never good at coding and I admire anyone who could even get through it alive.

"Can't call yourself a SIT student without even knowing the simple basics of programming" so they said, I'm still trying so hard to gain weight let alone to bother about my code issue. But I can't graduate without passing G301!

Someone help me.

Please.

P.S - Oh please tell your families, friends, girlfriends/boyfriends, godkids, pets whatever - if they decide to choose RP as their polytechnic of choice; they must be that desperate. (back then I was anyway...)