This is the final week of semester 4 with classes! The week after is study week and then came exam that will mark the half-way of my university life. Time flies so fast.
Monday, I woke up around 9 am and then arrive at the lab of CZ3001 around 10 am, meeting the other team members for catching up on one another, preparing for the “assessment”. Our group was assessed by Mr Pramod, the first lecturer which lecture was very boring, and we were smoothly explaining our report to him (as opposed to Ms Smitha on other groups who was said to see the codes and changing here and there, and asked them to explain). After the assessment, I went back and continued revising for CZ2007. In the afternoon, I went to a talk at Innovation Centre on IoT: An Engineers Perspective which I think was better titled “Connectivity of IoT Devices” as the speaker focuses heavily on its connectivity rather than other aspects that I expected. Nevertheless, it was a heavy and insightful talk. After that, I went to Llaollao to have a fro-yo to cool down my head before going back and continue revising. The revision went till midnight before I was distracted by Compfest website which was basically a Cookie Clicker in which I build a JS snippet to click them overnight.
Tuesday started early. I went to SCE lounge to meet others for final practice of CZ2006 demo. Then after that we went to the lab. Ours is 2nd to present. My part, on live app demonstration, went quite well and quite cool as there was a live email notification on my phone which I showed to the audience (luckily no other notifications went in). After seeing the presentation of Zillion’s group, we went for lunch and then to CZ2007 quiz. This quiz on SQL part was just as hard as (if not harder) the tutorial questions (well, the “mock quiz” that was posted online was really easy; P.S. for the 15-mark SQL question, my answer contains 5 “SELECT” clauses combined into one SQL statement, hopefully this is correct). The Xpath related question was pretty hard as it asks for the nodes that was selected by the complicated Xpath queries. After that, my group submitted CZ3001 lab report then I went back and rested for very short time before going out to meeting the CEO of Healint at its office.
I was late by around 5 minutes (well, it was not expected that the 179 bus has 15-minute waiting time). The meeting which was like an interview went not really smooth. First I was introduced to other co-founders and was asked on what I’m doing now, I simply answered that I was busy preparing for exams :P Well, Nicolas who was there stated what projects that I’ve done and commented that I was an engineer that interpret his question quite literally “now”. I showed him c4 game and then showed him Raun. He asked about what design patterns I know. I replied that I knew MVC but not really follow it as I was skipping the Software Engineering lecture (umm, I’ve spoken wrongly: what I mean was I did not really know other as I was not following the lectures, and not that I do not follow the MVC design pattern). I informed him about my LILY part-time and he objected that I worked for LILY during my internship period considering the Intellectual Property stuffs (which was not clear in my LILY work) and my health (well, thinking of it at first yeah it seemed not really healthy to code for all day and night) Hence I said I probably end my work there during the internship period. (But my dilemma was that I did not want to leave it as it a nice revenue stream which I can utilize my Saturdays and Sundays time for that.) I also asked him about the Wikimania issue: he said that if I were to go to Wikimania 2015, I should end my internship earlier than the planned one (and not okay for me to work again after I came back; but he’ll discuss with the others first). He seemed not happy on what I did. He also said that “to make sure you learn much, we make sure you get a very challenging problems” (ouch, I understand that statement as “your internship period will be very tough”) Hmmm, let’s see how it goes and hopefully I can survive this internship period and went to Wikimania 2015. (If I went there, then I will have visited all of the North America countries yet I’ve just visited 4 out of 10 ASEAN countries).
Going back, I stopped by Fairprice to restock my food supply (especially milk, I only choose the ones which says Fresh Milk and not those with “milk solids” and “water” as its ingredients; fresh milk is more expensive, but tastes better [more like Dancow that I drank till high school]). I also bought my dinner from KFC. I had my dinner while watching Big Hero 6. It was a really good movie and amazingly detail-oriented. I then did nothing productive to celebrate the end of most assignments. I also updated my password for Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. since earlier that day when I submitted my report, I had my password typed wrong for number of attempts and I then typed it on the address bar to check whether I mistyped or not, and then Zillion saw it and read it out loud -_- Oh no, that’s my strongest password (it had combination of lowercase, uppercase, space, and was very long). I then changed my password to a shorted one (weaker) but then I activated 2FA for all of them.
Wednesday, I started the day by attending CZ3005 lab which I finished in 1.5 hours and the report was done quickly. After that, I had lunch and attended the final presentation session of Green Computing. By end of the session, I was sick of the work “Green”, “carbon”, “energy”, and “supercomputer”. Next I went to Canteen B to have early dinner again while browsing Hacker News. After that I went to the final BU8401 Management Decision Tools seminar which ended epic with the final tips “which if you gave 5, 5, 5… only then you can see the tips” -_- Surely, I’ll be missing this epic teacher. This was my third Minor in Business module and so far all of the modules were very nice: the epic “please start the lecture recording” BU8201 lecturer; the lawyer of BU8301 who remembers a lot of cases (including on-going ones); and the CS-guy of BU8401 who always do epic announcements. At night, I did come LILY work before watching stuffs from Last Week’s Tonight; TBBT; etc.
Thursday was spent on writing blog. I had the whole day free because there were no more lectures (although I skipped one since it was not worth the trouble of transportation). I wrote and wrote and wrote. Quite much because there are 3 week worth of recalling and writing. I started after lunch and finish writing them just after dinner. Before lunch, I did some experiments regarding Windows Store application (since there are lots of QR code reader but almost all are not free) I search online and found the piece of code and just make it work. (can read QR code; although my initial intention was barcode, but it failed). At night, I went to work part-time at CITS SSLP, as usual, there were few work and I finished my backlog of lecture recordings: Green Computing and CM8003 From Alchemy to Chemistry.
I woke up very early on Friday to be kiasu for booking Nanyang House function room for NTUBS Senior Appreciation Party on 17 May. After booking, I went down to Giant, bought some stuffs and then went back to my room, continue sleeping (around 1-hour worth), before starting to watch recordings of CM8003. I came across a more modern media player foobar2000 in which with the help of online tutorial, I make it as visually similar to Winamp, but not quite satisfied, hence I still use Winamp. After lunch, I continued the MOOC of learning TypeScript. Quite easy: I can answer the modules question purely with my OOP and JavaScript knowledge. I dedicated some time for doing the project and submitted it right away. Around 3pm, I went to school for buying Past Year exam paper and solution. Initially I planned not to buy for this semester (the effect of Green Computing + save money) but then the online resources of solution provided by the school club was terrible: for each paper that I take, it was not as complete as what they provide to the printing shop (yeah, the school club is the one who provide the solution for the printing shop to print and distribute). I wonder why. After that I attended my final tutorial session for the semester on CZ3005 Artificial Intelligence. The session went short and concise. After that I went back and relaxed for a while. After dinner, I joined the online contest of PayPal Code Challenge in which I only managed to solve only 1 problems out of 3 problems attempted (those three are easy problems and should be ad hoc problem). Yeah my ad hoc problem solving skill sucks. I was told later after the contest that in the easiest problem, there was a tricky grammar case. At 9 pm, I went to SAC for Awaken Challenge coach meeting. Wah, it has been year since I joined this competition and this time being a coach. After that meeting, I went to McD for ice-cream and then went back. Going back, I configured my GitHub after activating 2FA and it did not work normally anymore. The workaround is to use SSH which got me troubled in generating the keys.
Saturday was CP day. I woke up to Google Code Jam Round 1A in which I successfully solved A-small and A-large in one shot; and B-small (but failed on B-large). After that I went as quickly as I can to TR+5 for NTU ICPC training contest which was quite hard that day. I attempted like 4 questions in which I only got 1 AC. The other 2 was more on maths and I got WA. The final one: I’m pretty sure it is binary search the answer but yet I still got WA. Finally the contest was over. It was the last session for the whole semester. For this occasion, Mr Kevin treat us pizza at Pizza Hut NTU. And woah, a slice of pizza was very large. He hoped that we can join again next semester and pass the national contest before going for ICPC Regional Singapore. After this, I went back and realized that it’s 3 pm already. I rested and after dinner, I spent the night finishing lecture recordings on CM8003 which was very entertaining for a lonely Saturday night :’) while also doing laundry and some room cleaning. I also started doing lecture review for the courses.
I went to BF on Sunday for a talk by Bro James Khoo on Karaniya Metta Sutta. After that I went back and rested for a while before finishing lecture summary of CZ3001. I also continued for a while on edx TypeScript course until Module 6. Around 9pm, I went to celebrate Si Hui’s birthday with the others at Hall 2. We had lots of fun and tired of laughing to all those puns. After I went back, I think I am addicted to John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight Show on YouTube as I watch and watch and still wanting more of it. The show was a comedy on the current events, mostly on America’s issues. It somehow resembles “News Dot Com” (and “Democrazy”) of Metro TV back around 2005, a show where they critic the government and current issues while elaborating some comedy.