29 May 2015 – 6 June 2015
It’s been a long time since I last wrote a post here. But in the past 3 weeks, I’ve gone through internship at a start-up company called Healint at Block 71 Ayer Rajah, at one-north. It was around 40-minute far away from NTU and hence I did not apply for concession card. Generally, the lunches were more expensive compared to those sold at NTU. Work experience has been not as good as expectation: the project described at the interview to be done in this internship has been done and now the interns are assigned other stuffs. Since describing every day of the working life may be a breach of confidentiality of the company, I will just summarize the events happening each week and describe more where appropriate. Usually after the work, I went back to NTU being hungry and tired. And during my first two weeks, there are still CNS (NTUBS Freshmen Orientation Camp) work to be done.
First week of my internship started with me coming to the company and they were quite surprised as I supposed to start doing internship on the following week though I requested to start earlier and they accepted it. After my supervisor came, I were introduced to the whole people of the company which is around 15 people. There was also an intern from NUS who started doing internship from December 2014 and took leave just for doing internship o.O
Many times in my first day I found myself idling. But that was just the first day, on subsequent days, I find myself quite busy doing the work. Basically I did the app prototype using Framer.js and some other stuff like analyzing the app statistics.
On this first week of internship, there were numerous CNS programmer meetings (on Monday for skit practice; Tuesday and Thursday for program meeting). I ended the week buying some groceries and dinner before going back. I reached my room just before 8pm and watched “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” while having my dinner and then ate some grapes. It was a nice superhero movie.
Saturday started quite late. I had this dream about being with Leonard in the last day of school. Well, I think that I missed him being my deskmate and my best friend. The last time I met him was on Chinese New Year of 2014. Later, after breakfast, I went to NYH to meet Wei Yang and Handoko, checking some stuffs before they going out to buy CNS Trial stuffs. After that, I went to North Spine and had lunch at McDonald’s before going to LWN to print some documents. I just remembered that there is this price hike on printing (new price was 0.045 per B/W page; up from 0.04 per B/W page). After that, I went back and had a nap. After the nap, I watched “Night at the Museum: The Secret of the Tomb”. It was a funny and nice movie. After that, at night Ivan and Andy + le wild Rizky came to my room to prepare gifts for NTUBS Senior Appreciation Party (SAP). We did cutting and decorating photo frames.
Sunday started late. I started the day downloading and activating Adobe Creative Cloud Photography plan which I received 1-year for free from Adobe (probably due to my newsletter subscription). This plan includes Photoshop CC and Lightroom CC. Well, I’ve never used Lightroom, so might as well try it out. At noon, I went to Canteen 1 for lunch and then went to Ivan’s room and NYH for initial preparation of SAP: bringing up stuffs, arranging tables, and speaker & projector setup. Next, I and Teheri were called down (grounded? :P ) to Hall 2 for helping the cooking. After some time, I, Teheri, and Freddy went up to NYH to start decoration process. First we were told to color some stuffs. Quite fun, as I haven’t been doing this creative process for quite long time already. Time passed and it was time when participants coming and then the event started. It started with Prof Tan Hun Tong, NTUBS staff advisor, giving speech on making this celebration an event which is a good point to mark turning from childhood to real adulthood, because learning does not stop, but learning has changed form from being prepared by teachers to whatever form it may takes in real life. He then reads out a part from Mangala Sutta, which reminded us to support our parents even if our salary was small, just give them little allowance to show that we are supporting them. He reminded us also for timely listening to Dharma, as many of us may not have the time as much as student to be able to fulfill spiritual satisfaction (as stated in Maxlow’s hierarchy of needs that puts Self-transcendence at the top of the pyramid). Next was NTUBSA president, Bro Hong Seng sharing on what kind of person the current society needs as educated by the Ministry of Education: confident, able to communicate ideas, able to work in teams. (if I don’t remember wrongly :P) Next we had dinner and then mingled around playing games (on our own and a mass game). After that we had group photo and then they were given the gift and were dismissed. Well, I can say that this event cleaning part was the most messy one since I haven’t been doing this stuff for some time already, this is my first time supporting SAP, and there is lack of manpower.
Second week of internship starts with meeting new friends from NTU doing internship. The week has been also quite tiring since every time I ended my internship, I will arrive back in NTU tired and hungry. After that, I just wanted some entertainment since the whole day I’ve been starting at the monitor.
The Wednesday night were spent with ICPC mates to watch the live-stream of ACM ICPC World Finals 2015 in TR+1. We had a pizza, read some problems, and attempted to solve it. Besides that, the Indonesian National Olympiad in Informatics is ongoing and we also attempted to solve the problems.
On Friday night, I’ve had a CNS meeting to settle the logistic stuffs which ended quite late. And on this night, Dian squatted in my room since he has returned his room key to hall office.
The 2nd week ended with CNS mini-trial which was fun but the logistic part was chaotic, just like the CNS 2014 trial. Overall, I’ve gained a lot of constructive feedback from those who joined. After this tiring event, I joined BBQ organized by people of my hometown. We’ve had a great time catching up.
That Sunday I woke up late around 10:30 am and then slacked off lots of times. I also went to NYH and met Andy returning NTUBS stuffs to the cabinet. Now the cabinet is very packed with stuffs. Another thing is I chatted with Andy and he “passed” the Awaken Challenge PIC responsibility to me as I was considered to be the freest and will be available during the event itself.
Another thing I did accomplish is to publish my game c4 into Windows Store. How did I do it? Read this post, but basically very simple.
Third week of internship. I mostly did similar work as the previous week, though this week has been quite tough as there are numerous small projects that I was involved in and I was switching around works which lowered my productivity and increased my stress level. Most of the nights were spent relaxing from the hectic work.
That Wednesday night, I had my NTUBS Coordinator interview. I applied for Honorary General Secretary position. The interview lasted quite long: around 1.5 hours and I was so tired after that. I can say that it was quite okay though at some questions, my answer backfired but I can still defend my stand.
Friday night was movie night: when I went back from work, I stopped by Fairprice (to restock milk and snacks) and KFC (for dinner) and then watched Guardians of the Galaxy while eating my dinner and then continued with eating grapes. The movie was quite okay, I did not really get what the story is because I watched without subtitles and there are number of alien names used.
On Saturday, I did my laundry and then basically did nothing productive till suddenly around 2pm, Ivan texted me and called for meeting with other current coordinators to inform my result of the interview. Well, the result is still secret :P After that, I rushed to Serangoon to meet my aunt, who has been in Singapore for 1.5 months, treating her breast cancer. On this occasion, my uncle’s family also visited her. I think that she now looked less happy and less energetic. I asked what she do there when there are no medical appointment, she said that she just did nothing; in that apartment, there are no TV, so basically she can’t do anything. Well I can imagine how depressing it is to have nothing to do and just wait for the next treatment to occur. She is quite interested in going to temple that I pointed out: KMSPKS, located around Bishan area. Hopefully she can have something to do there on the days where she got nothing to do. I’ve watched The Fault in Our Stars and think that cancer did not make her disabled person, she is fully able person, just needed to have some medication at some points. I think what matter most is support from families and friends. Hope that she can get better.
On Sunday, I woke up late, again. This day, besides doing laundry, I scanned all of my cheatsheets, edited it to be better, and then publish it online. It took the whole day doing this. I also met Xin Wen and Ze Yong at NYH, borrowing NTUBS trolley to move stuffs. At night, I finally practiced with my ICPC team a Codeforces virtual contest with code.kenrick95.org and gained some valuable feedback like the unresponsive design and some other stuffs.
Note: Originally I thought I will write till my third week of internship, till I suddenly become so busy that this post has been left a draft for quite some times till the end of my 4th week, so why not just add the 4th week into it?
June the first was the Vesak Day public holiday in Singapore. I celebrated it with my NTUBS people by going to temple. We went to Buddha Dharma Mandala Society (BDMS) dharma talk which Bhante S. Dhammika launched a new free distribution book there. Hmm, there was another free-D book launch at PMT; probably some time in the future I should contact them to get those books for NTUBS. So the place was really crowded that we, who came late, has to be seated in the BDMS library room, only hearing what the venerable talked. After that, we had an opportunity to try rice-milk from the venerable and then went to lunch provided by them. After lunch, we went to the Burmese temple near there (yeah the name is “Burmese Buddhist Temple”) in which we pay respect to the Buddha there and then went off. The NTUBS MC (me, Ivan, Si Hui, Freddy, Andy, Teheri, Jeff) split from the rest (CW [though he got stuck with us and left afterwards], Diego, Benny, Agung) and went out for an outing. After spending some time discussing what to do, finally we decided to play bowling at SAFRA Mount Faber. It was quite a long journey there. Playing bowling was quite hard but beginners luck really happened, I hit all the pins on my first try! And I had the 2nd place after the round ended. Not bad for first time player huh? After that we had dinner at Eighteen Chef at Cathay building with Su Ann and Crystal joining for dinner. I had spaghetti with some Japanese curry, scrambled egg, and chicken sausage. The pasta was too hard, but overall was quite nice :) It was really tiring though, to hear Jeff talking all day long.
My 4th week of internship was quite okay since I’ve finished those multiple small projects and I can now embark on whatever small project that were listed. I also noticed that my consumption of green tea has increased and there was an occasion that my water bottle did not deplete because I kept drinking tea during my work.
Wednesday night, I had a meeting with the Awaken Challenge participants and coaches to settle the next meeting schedules, reading updates among others, and other matters. Later on Thursday and Friday night, I was so busy preparing for the Saturday trial: I modified my current “ac” webapp to support multiple people answering the question on their own phone, while seeing a question screen, and with me controlling the screen while there is another scoreboard screen. It’s quite complicated. The data is stored at Firebase, which makes life much easier without me worrying about the real-time syncing among them.
On Saturday, I had this Awaken Challenge trial starting at 10am. After each question is being asked, answered, and checked; we discussed the question to enrich the participants knowledge and not for the sake of just answering it. Overall the system works quite well. But then there is still some technical problems, especially when the question screen has some lag (that the update is seen first on the participants screen before I saw it); or when the sfx is out-of-sync with the rest; well I think this can’t be helped as the system tied its data updates to Firebase which makes communication between client and Firebase server important and out of my control.
After that, I had a little meeting with Andy discussing what’s next for AC and then I went back for having little rest (though I chatted with Lenny for quite some time, well, after our relationship ended, every now and then we still meet with our high school friends and our interaction there has been quite awkward) Then I went out to join NTUBS Alumni Vesak Day celebration at Little Bodhi Student Care Centre, owned by them, near Marsiling MRT Station. It started with dinner and we were entertained by a man wearing full Spider-man costume making balloons and sculpt them into cute shapes and give it to the kids.
On Sunday I actually woke up at 8, then decided not to got to BF as I was pretty tired and went back to sleep till 9, and then a little more sleep and it’s 10. In general, it was not a productive one, while struggling to complete this piece. Then an unproductive afternoon struck me, my world stuck around watching YouTube video, failing to take a nap because of too much thought, and Hacker News. Time was up, I went to Hall 2 Block 1 Pantry to help Ivan (+ Freddy) prepare food for dinner which is salad (after I took Ivan’s misplaced stuff at NYH). Later we had dinner with Su Ann, HH, and Teheri. The salad was nice, natural yet filling (maybe because of the potatoes). We also SEA Games 2015 Swimming finals took place and we watched it. The purpose of this dinner was actually a NTUBS support team meeting, but the meeting was like very minor part since we had very few things to talk about, mostly about the plan for Management Retreat 2. After that we cleaned up the utensils and then we went up to NYH placing back some stuffs. Oh ya, I was hit by a strange flying insect (more like I accidentally hit it) and then as a result there is a spot in my palm that is very itchy (but as time of writing, the itch has gone).