Week 10, Semester 3

26 October 2014

This week had been another busy week, again, with deadline of Technical Communication report being this week. But the public holiday in the middle of the week made the week a nice one. Besides that, my URECA project was interestingly progressing well. I ended the week with participating as helper in Committee Day and attending a talk at BF.

Started Monday normally with CZ2002 tutorial and then CZ2001 lab, which the presentation of our group seems okay. Next was CZ2002 assignment group meeting and I went to LCC for checking our group’s HW0210 report. The coach here pointed out a number of things, mostly about the structure and very few about grammar, but we couldn’t accept most of his comments as they were unnecessary to do and some differed from the notes that our course tutor taught. I went back to my room to settle down stuffs and then rushed to NYH to take key for the night’s event. Then I went down to Canteen 1 having dinner together before going up again to NYH to set up things for the Dharma Class 4: Karma: Action and Reaction. This class is interesting, Bro Kweh introduced Karma as one of the Niyamas, definitions of Karma, and then went to the categories of Karma. Besides that, this is the first class of the semester that I saw some general people (maybe non-members) attending the event. After event, we cleaned up and then I went back to my room and then started to revise the HW0210 report until quite late.

I skipped the lecture of Algorithms to give me an extra hour of sleep time. But I attend the next lecture of OODP as it was a valuable lecture on design principles. After that, I and Edwin finalized the HW0210 report and printed it along with the individual abstracts and other stuffs. Next I had lunch and then went for CZ2004 and CZ2001 tutorials. Then, I attended CZ2003 lecture before I went back to have some rest. At night, I continued doing my CZ2004 Hi-Fi prototype and watching movie: Elysium, which reminds us about the inequality of the Earth. And maybe this is one of the rare movie which the primary character actually died in the end.

Wednesday was holiday. It was so nice to have a holiday in a busy week like this. I woke up quite late and the day was spent on implementing the CZ2002 assignment in Java which took up the whole afternoon. The day was a slack one as I did lots of not-so-productive things like watching The Big Bang Theory.

I woke up early for CZ2005 lecture, continued with CZ2003 tutorial and BU8301 lecture then its tutorial. I had a rest before going for NTUBS MC meeting and left them after an hour for part-time work cum URECA research. The research was going much more fun than the CZ2002 assignments as the research was super flexible. On the other hand, I forced Edwin to use git (GitHub) in sharing the URECA project. The learning point from the “working” session is to always pull first before continuing coding because merging may fail and if it failed, you gonna have a tough time fixing it.

On Friday, I endured the marathon of CZ2003, CZ2002, CZ2001 lectures, and CZ2005 tutorial before going for lunch and then back for rest. At 3pm, Edwin visited me to continue coding, which we almost finished the coding, along with changing quite number of the UML structure. At night, I, Peter, and Joshua attended the ICPC training session which we finally went full-team :P

Saturday was NTUBS Committee Day 2014. It started early at NYH, I had barely chance to be with the group as I was part of manpower of the game station in the morning and part of BBQ team in the afternoon. For the BBQ preparation session, I was tasked to cut corns and wrap them up in aluminum foil. I realized one thing: cutting corn with knife was quite hard task that may require lots of force. After the task, I was just helping around, especially preparing the fruit skewers with Teheri. I guess banana was a bad choice for this as it makes the dish looks not nice. It was a fun experience in standing for like 4 hours in pantry to prepare the ingredients for BBQ. During the transition from preparation to execution, I observed that  unexpected stuffs and stresses occurred to Raymond and Jeff, it reminded me of CNS 2014 especially on Day 1. Nevertheless, just like CNS, the BBQ went on and everything went well thanks to them :) The BBQ ended with some of us cleaning up the place while Naing Htoo giving Burmese language lesson :P Going back, I took the chance to watch The Legend of Korra Book 4 Episode 4, which I found to be meaningful in letting go of the past.

On Sunday, I went to Buddhist Fellowship Sunday Service which was crowded. The talk, held by Bhante Rathanasara, discussed about the significance of Kathina. In short, Kathina was robe giving ceremony for monks who completed vassa (rainy season retreat). At first, I thought Kathina was before vassa so the monks will have enough resources during the vassa. After the talk, I had lunch there and went back, had some rest and did lecture recording for CZ2004. After dinner, I continued CZ2004 assignment which now I regard as almost complete. :)

The week had been a roller coaster. Next week, besides the high load of assignments, I’ll be going to KL with Peter & Joshua as a team for ACM ICPC Regional Kuala Lumpur. May I survive the week :)

Good luck, have fun!