19 January 2014
This week is the first academic week of semester 2 in NTU. Many days of this week were spent until late night.
On Monday, I had the first lab (on CZ1007, Data Structure), even before the first lecture (which was just right after the lab). It’s such a weird schedule but it’s fine because the lab itself is simple enough. After CZ1007 lecture, I had CZ1006 (Computer Organisation and Architecture) first lecture. After lunch, I had CZ0001 (Engineers and Society) lecture which was hard to understand and boring. The day ended with EE8087 (Living with Mathematics) lecture which I found interesting although the introduction was boring as the lecturer gives so much history talks before giving out the interesting real-life math problem.
On Tuesday, I had the first lecture on CZ1008 (Engineering Mathematics) and continued by the boring CZ0001. In the afternoon, after I had lunch at Canteen A, I went to meet with Aru, who is currently working on Dashsell. Before this day, he found my fondness in developing some web applications and because of that, he would like to meet me. In this “meeting”, I was like talking very much, which I rarely do, maybe because I’m talking about what I’ve done and about what I liked. I showed him my GitHub projects, and the TWoS projects. After this “meeting”, I went to Athena to meet Ivan, which I thought was having a NTUBS meeting, but then it turned out to be just study group; I then introduced the library website to Ivan. Next, I had BU8201 (Business Finance) lecture which I found somehow interesting. After the lecture, I joined the dinner together with NTUBS members at Canteen A. We then went to Hall 13 TV Lounge to play board games until around midnight.
On Wednesday, the day started in afternoon with the first lecture on CM8001 (Impact of Chemistry on Society) which was quite nice to recall all those chemistry concepts but the lecture slides are too wordy and have many typos. After spending some times on LWN Library and taking dinner, I went to GTD16 (PINTU FOC) subcomm recruitment at Canteen B. Some days have passed, and I received an SMS stating that I was not accepted as one of the committees. Never mind, let’s try again next year.
On Thursday, I, Zillion, and Peter went to Jurong Point to buy a cake for a surprise for Grace at Canteen A. After buying cake, I directly went to Canteen A to “chop” places. The surprise was a surprising one for her although it almost failed because of the proximity of the “hiding” place to the “surprise” place. After this, we went to CZ1007 and CZ1006 lectures. And then I went to EE8087 lecture, but then I went to the wrong lecture theatre. This was my first time to enter a wrong LT. I realized that I went to a wrong LT when the slides in front is not about mathematics, instead it was about introduction to a new course. I then rushed to check the correct location which was just the LT besides the current LT. Surprisingly, the lecture hasn’t started, also because the lecturer has just arrived and he told us that he just went to a wrong LT too. This time the lecture is quite interesting. He introduced a way to measure the distance and height of a far object by using simple tools (ruler and protractor; and maybe calculator too). After the lecture, I went to meet Zhi Kai, another co-founder of Dashsell, at Canteen B which in turn he explained to me more about Dashsell and he took me to Dashsell office at Innovation Center to have a look. In their office, I met Aru and another guy, they are working (coding) some stuffs. It was just a short sightseeing before I went back to my hall. Tired, but the day did not end here. Around 1040, I and Hartono took the last bus to Hall 3, to celebrate Jessica’s birthday there with the others at midnight. In the times waiting till midnight, I followed the story of faking Rizky’s birthday celebration.
On Friday, after the CZ1008 lecture and lunch, I went to LWN to have my first job in the semester. This semester, I worked part-time at CITS counter at LWN Library from 1300-1700. Luckily, I went there early and had a talk with the current SA. Because when I started my slot, I had trouble signing in, and a person is inquiring me about that; whew, I panicked and somehow called the previous SA who said that he would come back to help me. In turn, I apologized to the person and referred him to CITS at One Stop @ SAC. And then, the previous SA came and helped me set some things up. The job was quite tiring as I also did PC check (I just make sure that every PC is on) on all the LWN PCs. Although the guide said that it took around 15 minutes, in reality, I took around 30 minutes to do that all. After all the troubles, finally I had some free time, and worked on my tutorial questions. I observed that the job here is not that crowded compared to the times at One Stop @ SAC when the semester starts.
After the job, I went to Canteen 1 to had dinner together with NTUBS Resource team before having a meeting at Hall 6 TV Lounge. The meeting turned out to be not as long as expected and we had a long time to wait before having real Rizky birthday celebration. Luckily Chun Wah brought the board games that I joined playing on Tuesday night and then we had some fun playing the game. The TV lounge got more and more crowded as the time passed. In the end, Rizky was brought here by Andy and HH; and when we wanted to surprise him, we were surprised by the presence of security guard. At last we had the celebration done inside the TV Lounge, and then the other “evil” plan, like forcing him to eat porridge, worked as planned. Rizky is observant enough to observe that HH did not take 199 bus and chose to walk; and the oddness that HH & Andy went to Giant at past closing time, we did not notice that before Rizky said it. But then, the plan to make Rizky believe in a birthday celebration the night before was a great success.
On Saturday, NTUBS Resource team (and other people who are invited by Ivan) met at Nanyang House on 9 am to clean the cabinet. Here, I just knew that NTUBS stuffs are so many that I did not expect to be there, e.g. a toolbox containing tools for mechanics. The most interesting part was to see the NTUBS archive, which contains some very old stuffs, like the old versions of Prajna and Pattra; and Rizky even found some old unused stamps. I also just knew that there is a Bodhi tree planted near Nanyang House by the early days NTUBS committee. The cleaning also resulted in many items gone to trash as “no one will use them anymore, and if we keep it, it will still be kept for years”; and the stocks of items (like past camp T-shirts) are given out to those who cleaned the cabinet as there was already the archive of those things. The cleaning ended at 5 pm, and we did not cover the cleaning of library books.
On Sunday morning, I went to Buddhist Fellowship. Arriving early, I did not know anyone there until Edison & Felecia came just before 11. The meditation session in loving kindness was a nice one, although it was very short one, because the speaker guided it nicely. The speaker this time mainly talked about meditation: the types, the objects, and the benefits of doing meditation. After having lunch there, I went back to hall and started to finish the tutorials for the first week. By the way, for the dinner, it was exactly one week since my last meal in Canteen 11.
Some days have passed since I’ve been dreaming about being in some fantasy world, playing role of a character in some stories. Every time I woke up, I realized that in my dreams, I saw things clearly without my spectacles, i.e. in my dreams, I’m not wearing spectacles and see things clearly. Once in the past, I remembered a dream very clearly, even hearing a song I’ve never heard before.
The week has been a not-so-tiring-but-yet-not-so-relaxing one. For the next weeks, I hope I can survive the semester.