On 6th May, I and my sister went to watch Kingdom Hearts Orchestra World Tour at Singapore Esplanade Concert Hall. The music was simply wonderfully crafted and it brought so much nostalgia, but it also made me realize how much I haven’t caught up with KH saga. …
It was a fine day in November 2016 when out of a sudden, Coldplay put out hints in interviews that they are going to play in Asia. I was hyped, and later that month, they dropped a hint that they’ll play in Singapore. Well well well, it was perfect.
The only issue out there was on securing the ticket, as the band has become mainstream and of course a lot of people would like to see them.
It was the day of the presale for Citibank card holders yet I didn’t have one. The seller website asked for the first 6 digits before selecting seat and checking out and I had just an indigenous idea. I googled it. Yes I did, and of course what I found was the sample card numbers of it, but I tried to key it in anyway. And it worked! So yeah, I was really excited and went on to select Cat 1 seat, and checked out directly. When it asked for a credit card number, well, I keyed in my usual one. (well, since I shopped quite a lot in the previous weeks, I have accidentally memorized my credit card number, including the CVV)
So that’s it for the 2016 part.
…
31 December 2016
(rushing, because I have procrastinated a lot in my holiday)
I started off December with my last final exam on CZ4042 Neural Networks. It was an open book examination and I felt I did quite okay in it. Then, on 5th, I presented my FYP to my prof and examiner; some of my friends were also there watching. My prof later told me that, I should come back the day after for some further discussion regarding my FYP: she wanted me to just reformat my FYP and publish it on ArXiv.
In my final days in NTU hall, I attended a PINTU photo shoot, packed my stuffs, spent lots of hours playing games (Tropico 5, Cities:Skylines). On 7 Dec, I moved out from NTU hall. Moving was done via Lalamove which was booked earlier on, but during the appointed time, the driver wasn’t contactable, such that I called Lalamove support and they changed the driver. The 2nd driver got lost in NTU but after some time, finally we met. Quickly, I loaded all my stuffs inside the van. It was just half full. I tagged along in the van to Boathouse. The journey there was quite hot as the car aircon isn’t working well. The driver also helped the unloading part with lots of trolleys. Because of this, the unloading only took 1 trip. After finished moving, I already gained around 10k steps (and it was just around 3 pm). I was really tired.
There were few days spent here before I went back to Medan. I spent the first night going to Hougang Central, bought an HDMI cable (to connect my laptop to the TV), and watched The Martian. It was a really nice movie. After that, I continued with playing Cities:Skylines on TV. Woah, it was really nice having a large screen and managing a city. This time, my Bluetooth keyboard and long-wired mouse were put into a good use.
The next day, I woke up quite early to go to Heartland Mall, Kovan, meeting Hadi Wijaya who presented to me some stuff about finance and investment. Honestly I didn’t feel like meeting him but since I was free, so why not. #TIL: There is a kind of investment where you can sell some kind of stock (even when you own nothing) before buying it back. After that meeting, I went around at Heartland Mall and found one laundry shop. I ate lunch at the hawker centre next to the mall before going to Hougang Central again. At Hougang Central, I found another laundry shop, and then I shopped at Fairprice. Going back, I watched The Reverant. The picture was really good, but the story wasn’t. I continued with having nap, playing more games, swimming, and then had dinner at the small hawker center on the opposite of Boathouse, around the HDB area. The night was spent on watching Star Trek: Into the Darkness (it was also very good) and playing Cities:Skylines.
On 9th December, I essentially spent the whole day playing game and watching movies to the point that I was bored with them. Lunch was taken at another hawker centre (Foodfare) along Boathouse, where I found a coin laundry shop and another Fairprice. I went in and bought ice cream to eat along when watching Avatar (James Cameron’s one) later on. The movie was long and really nice. There was call-to-adventure, main character had fun exploring and gaining experience, having conflicts, and best of all, a happy ending. I ate dinner at the hawker centre opposite Boathouse again and then go on to watch The Nightmare Before Christmas.
I went back to Medan on 10 December. Going to airport quite early by bus from Hougang Central. In Medan, days were passed with boring routines: Play games and other chores
Some tasks that were planned to be done in this holiday were done quickly
This holiday, I downloaded more games (legally from Steam, bought at Humble Bundle at a highly discounted price :P ). I spent way too much hours on Prison Architect, an addictive prison building-and-managing game, with a “campaign” (story mode), sandbox mode, and also escape mode. I also started and finished Chroma Squad on casual (easy/ way too easy) mode. The story was okay, though I felt too much reference to Kickstarter backers were mentioned. Besides that, I continues playing on Cities:Skylines.
On movies, I watched Rouge One on the day after it premiered in cinemas. Besides that, I also caught up with TBBT season 10 and Star Wars Rebels season 3.
On friends, I caught up with friends from high school, where we ate at Seoul Garden CP at Christmas Eve (irrelevant info as we don’t really have anything Christmasy :P ). Besides that, on 29th, Golfin came to my house to do the usual data transfer thingy :P
November was the month of another endings:
Some other events:
Realized that I have free Starbucks drink so I go and claim one. Turns out that I could claim any drink of any size (so I claimed the Venti size :P )
Regarding coursework:
The day of big spending
There was one day, after I bought my flight tickets, I spent a lot of money for various stuffs: paying flight tickets, collected micro SD card, and bought new earphone from Challenger JP, bought lots of groceries from JP in preparation for reading week. In total, there were around $200 was spent.
November was also the month where I really submitted FYP Amended Final Report. Good thing is that the examiners and my prof asked for softcopy. Saved paper & money :)
Just before the reading week started, I joined JCU GameJam with Dian, Pentium, and Aristo. It was a game jam, mainly using Unity, but every one of us except Aristo had any experience with it. So, on the day, we went there by MRT and a 10-minute walk. The school itself felt quite new though quite ulu. One thing I realized is that the area was around the Singapore’s Zika outbreak area. Oops.
The Gamejam started at 6 pm. But Pentium came in late, and Aristo is still rushing his assignment report during that time, where me and Dian supposed to follow Unity’s tutorial. Few hours passed by and we finally get started for real, being guided by Aristo. By daylight, we had somewhat slept for a while and finished our own stuffs. Meanwhile, I was waiting for other people to finish their part.
In the morning, when Aristo finally integrated the main character to the game, we were amazed :P He implemented objects orbiting around the main character. Woah. No wonder it took a long time. In the afternoon, progress was still slow and the level were badly designed by me. In the final 2 hours, something terrible happened. Somehow, the synchronization with GitHub failed to update the configurations of Unity. (hint: we included the “meta” file to gitignore; do not do this) After we realized our mistake, the atmosphere became very intense. Basically, we rushed in the final hours to integrate and also build the game. We submitted it in the final minutes and the gamejam was over.
One strange thing about the game jam is that the showcase was on the day after. So we need to wake up early in the morning and came to the place again to “showcase” our games. There was a Pac-Man challenge too, essentially playing the real Pac-Man at the old consoles located in their library. After lunch, we were relocated to a public lecure and then the announcement. We didn’t win anything, even from the lucky draw. So yeah, we went home afterwards.
Anyway, few days afterwards, Coldplay’s concert in Singapore was announced! EXCITED EXCITED EXCITED. I BOUGHT CAT-1 TICKET AT THE FIRST PRE-SALE! 1st row 2nd seat, see how much NTU’s STARS Wars have prepared me for this kind of first-come first-serve (read: kiasu) online situations.
In first half of November too, I continued implemented some requirements for LILY Silver Testbed platform. Now they told me to write documentation. Duh. Luckily they let me see the old documents and I adapted my documentation from that one.
In the reading week, I started to play Tropico 5. Basically becoming a dictator of an island. Building houses, industries, and services. Not as exciting as Simcity but still nice. Though after unlocking every buildings and advancing to the latest era, the game feels dull.
And then there were exams.
Then I have around 6 days of nothingness before my last final exam. Started by playing Steam games: Tropico 5. Continued by reading Douglas Adam’s book. Now on 2nd half of So Long and Thanks for All the Fish. It was hilarious: after some Arthur’s love story, the author looks tired of writing and dedicated a single chapter to suggest reader to just skip to the end.
Then I continued studying for the CZ4042 exam on 2 December.
Wikipedia Asian Month 2016. Oh yeah, November was also the Wikipedia Asian Month, for the 2nd time. Since I was not involved in building the tool, essentially I am not really useful this time. I helped the idwiki admins sending mass messages to participants, and I participated by creating 4 articles (to be eligible to the lowest reward).
(a very short update)
So today I received an e-mail notifications from Let’s Encrypt service stating that my SSL will expire in 19 days. I believe they will send more emails in the upcoming days, but since I have some free time, I went ahead to go and renew my SSL certificates. Everything went smoothly, but then I kind of forgot which file to copy to which field in IDHostinger’s control panel. I am now really grateful that I had written a tutorial about it in my blog >.< (and apparently it has helped a lot of others too, as it was now my blog post with most views (after my home page) and even a staff from Hostinger contacted me stating that they created their tutorial (which has much better screenshots & styles) based on my blog post. :) :) :)
3 November 2016
Yet another October has passed. So what happened in October?
It started with NTUBS MR1 ending. Emotional yet frustrating too. Essentially I was happy and sad at the same time because my involvement with NTUBS has finally (really finally) ended. It was really tiring, considering that I had lots of due dates in October.
On a side note, I accepted the job offer at Garena.
I found out Hacktoberfest and submitted few pull requests on GitHub, mainly on Microsoft’s BotBuilder project, fixing typos on their documentation. Halfway through October, I completed the challenge (of submitting 4 PRs) and they were all accepted.
After a personal embargo on ice cream since end-July 2016, I finally lifted it up and started to eat ice cream again. Oh, by the way, my personal embargo on Canteen A’s mixed rice was ongoing since mid-2015.
I submitted CZ4042 project 1. This project is quite tiring as the work is quite tedious: finding best project configuration by trial and error (a.k.a. “experiment”). And worse of all, we need to also submit a report.
I submitted my FYP to my supervisor for comments. He printed it out, pointed numerous mistakes but essentially the heavy parts (middle sections) were left unchanged (or unread). After receiving these feedback, I started to fix and revise on my FYP report.
I celebrated my 21st birthday. More on this in another post.
I built c4bot, after tired of writing FYP report. Deploying it on Azure, and the most frustrating part was to make sure its dependency (node-canvas) worked correctly. I also had to spend several days on getting the bot approved on Facebook Messenger.
By the way, I printed two copies of my FYP report, which drained my ez-link credits, and I submitted it to my supersivor & examiner.
I replied to my hall office about my final day of hall stay.
I completed CZ4073 Assignment 2. It was basically cleaning up a small stock price dataset (using means stated by the prof) and then build a decision tree model, and tune the parameters. Results wasn’t that good (around 30% accuracy !?) but I don’t care cause I will opt for “S/U” for this course. Hahaha
I presented in CZ4032 group project. Our group presented on music rating prediction which resulted in considerably decent result. A lot of meetings were carried out, maybe way too many meetings, for a so-so results.
To end October, I attended Geekcamp.sg 2016, where I during the breakfast period, I talked to a very senior software developer who gave me quite number of advice regarding career. Generally, the event itself was nice and not nice. Since it only has a single track, I would also need to go through talks that were uninteresting to me, like the one talking about using cardboard to communicate with satellites (which he talked a lot of other stuffs, yet he hasn’t finished this project). Some interesting stuffs include: Rust! GraphQL! Kubernetes! Hopefully I could explore more about these technologies later on.