NTU

December 2016

• Journal

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

  • I tried to set up my 2nd Pine board but I misconfigured it such that DHCP client was off and I couldn’t ssh into it anymore. I planned to just reflash it with the disk of the 1st Pine board once I got back to Singapore
  • I wrote a manga reader with Electron and Vue.js, then caught up with the latest Detective Conan manga. Whew, Akai’s family was complicated.

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 2016

• Journal

November was the month of another endings:

  • Final goodie bags from CEC, NTUSU, hall, NTUBS.
  • Another FYP deadline, though not as important as the one in October
  • The final final exam in NTU

Some other events:

  • Signed work contract. It’s a 14-page long terms where wordings seem repetitive yet extraordinarily comprehensive. A sentence might contain tens of adjectives. :P
  • Collected room key. That day I travelled to Serangoon to collect the room key from my aunt. The trip was quite productive as I make use of the long travel time to read the novel So Long and Thanks for All the Fish
  • Won ice-skating tickets (again) and I didn’t use it (again) since the expiry date was very soon (like 1-2 weeks after my collection, and it was nearing exam)

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:

  • Meeting with Prof Miao again where she offered me to consider taking PhD with her (though I expect the meeting was talking about my FYP report, in the end, but she said it was already okay)
  • Submitted CZ4042 Project 2. This project was actually run multiple and sufficient experiments such that you discover the best parameter that produces the best accuracy. Not quite fun, as I would just tune the parameters of a pre-written Matlab program, gather the result, and spend a lot of time doing the report. The report part was really not fun.
  • Submitted CZ4032 Project. Yeah, like finally, after too much meeting and too much demands from the boss.
  • Submitted CZ4073 Assignment 3.

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.

  • CZ4073 exam. S/U option is ticked. Not because it was difficult, just because I have S/U left, so why not put effort on others and let this be S/U-ed. Energy saved. I left the exam hall in around 1 hour 30 minutes.
  • CZ4032 exam. More difficult than expected. I suspect a lot of people did not finish the paper.

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).

Week 7 + “Recess” Week, Semester 4: Ketchup!

• Journal

Week 7

5 March 2015

I was late, really late for this blog post. I blame my laziness and business during the so-called Recess Week.

So my Week 7 started in Medan. I woke up around 5 am and departed to airport. There I met Steven Awi, Fannie & Finnie who are in the same flight. Inside the flight, I also met Sevilla (the one taught me A-level Physics), and Johan (someone who I met at BF). Throughout the flight back to Singapore, I slept a lot. After arriving at Changi Airport, well, the baggage claim was delayed as “there are additional security screening”. After that I went back to NTU alone via MRT; and oh well, holiday has ended. I started the unfinished job: getting permission for attending CZ3001 lab 3 that I missed cause I went back to my hometown; and settling NTUBS Resource meeting slides and coding! It’s been a while since I coded and committed daily to GitHub for my software engineering project. And well the codebase is getting more and more messier. I also went to NYH to book the Meeting Room for the Resource Meeting.

The next day I started the day with CZ2006 group meeting, and then I went to function room above LKC-LT to donate my blood. This was my third time and for a moment, I’m scared :P (I didn’t feel any of this for the previous two). After this, I ate lunch and went back to my room, resting for a while before going for CZ0002 Green Computing group meeting with Prof Dusit, who gives us the big picture on what to present. Next I attended other tutorial group’s CZ2007 tutorial (as I missed mine cause of the GC group meeting). Going back, I printed CZ3001 lab manual 3 and finished the NTUBS Resource meeting slides.

On Wednesday, I started the day with attending CZ3001 make-up lab, which was quite okay (not very confusing yet not easy) with a quiz at the end of the lab and we need to submit a report by the Monday after recess week. After lunch, I went back, rested, and did some catch-up watching the lecture recording (which has been accumulated till 12 hours!). As always, I speed the recording up to 2x to save time. I ended the day with BU8401 seminar, which was interesting as always and after going back I continued the software engineering project.

On Thursday, I passed the day reading a nice article on JavaScript (at Eloquent JavaScript free online book). It was presented really nice featuring the newest JavaScript features and not the boring programming syntax. After lunch, I went to attend CZ2007 lecture (my only physical lecture during the e-learning week) and went back after that. I rested and did some lecture recording. It was on this day too that my package from Happiness Printed was delivered to Bumbox. The package contain 100 printed 5×5 photos of my #100happydays challenge, which I completed last year. So around January I revisited 100happydays.com and saw that for those who completed the challenge, we can join a survey and get a free coupon code for printing the 100 photos (excluding shipping fees). I ordered it and sent it to Bumbox as last time I had some lost package issue with Hall Office by sending it to my hall address. Bumbox was not really convenient firstly because it has a quite expensive storage rate and yet we had to go to the Bumbox collection points to collect our own package. Compared to the previous system: Hall Office receive our package on our behalf for free and just need to go to our own hall office to collect the item. So after I collected my stuffs, I went back to my hall and had some encounter with a visitor spike at my website of which I write about my investigation during my part-time job. Also during my part-time job I did CZ3005 online quiz and performed not very well as the questions were tricky. Going back after work, I encountered a site called “Project Intern” initiated by NUS Hackers that guided on how to apply for summer internship at big tech companies. I focused on the resume part as I felt my resume wasn’t that good and seen a good example. After that I revised my resume, deleted and reorganize many parts before I went to sleep.

On Friday, I started the day do a room booking at NYH. After going back, I started searching for internship at job portals (internsg.com and similar sites) and I applied to around 20 companies. At 11, I went to Hardware Project lab to register for my CZ3001 group project. Around afternoon, I was preparing for my NTUBS Resource meeting, and the first reply came! An interview offer by Healint (a start-up company) and they wanted to interview me on the next day! Umm, it was so rush yet I accepted their offer. On other occasion, one other company replied with a rejection as “the position was filled” and “wished me good luck in my job search”. I also did lecture recording and then went for the meeting. The meeting was really long and was filled with lots of ideas (mostly from Ivan :P ). After the meeting, I was really tired, maybe it was due to my introversion and I was exhausted for the day in speaking to a group of people. Going back, I started to search on the company background, also had this dilemma of whether wear long sleeve shirt or just polo T-shirt (as they were just a start-up company).

Saturday started with me having ICPC training contest which I performed poorly again. I think it was due to me being too attached to a problem which was near AC but still can’t achieve AC. (and later my friend had this hypothesis of the grader being wrong, as he tried on another OJ and the WA solution became AC). After lunch, I went back and had really short rest and decided to wear a long-sleeved shirt for the interview. The interview was held at their company located at Blk71 Ayer Rajah (a block which hosted lots of start-up companies) at one-north (around 40 mins of public transport from NTU). The physical company was quite small: no company sign was posted at the doors and I had quite hard time finding it. I was greeted by Mr Nicolas with a French-accented English and the interview started. I remembered to do lots of stuffs recommended to do during an interview, like smile throughout the interview, do not cross the hands, etc. He started with confirming me being fans of xkcd as he saw my website was xkcd style. After that he asked me about the company knowledge of which I was quite okay in explaining what the company did. After that he asked me for an introduction and I introduced myself shortly and ended with an awkward silence. Next he explained in detail about the company and we chit-chatted about what I’ve done: I showcased my ongoing software engineering project (the back-end, via REST API client); Raun (which was down at the main wmflabs site :'( ); and Code! (collaborative coding platform). I also mentioned that I’ve joined the AI MOOC which uses Python that I think made him sure that I can code in Python as required by the company. He also said that I will be required to display data in dashboard style using D3.js (of which I currently did not have the experience). The interview lasted around 40 minutes and then I went back after that, gaining some attention by meeting some friends on the way back. At night, I focused on resting my mind: watching The Maze Runner which was a really nice movie while doing laundry.

On Sunday, I did not go to BF as I was quite tired and will attend NTUBS Meditation Retreat. I started the day with coding, then editing Wikipedia, and then ending it with lecture recordings of which I finished all of accumulated hours, like finally! Around 5, I quickly packed up my stuffs minimally and around 6 I went for Boon Lay meeting the group for NTUBS Meditation Retreat. It was quite a long journey, (and I ate Choco-cone at Bishan Bus Interchange while waiting for the bus :P ) and we arrived at KMSPKS around 9 pm. There we were briefed by Ven Chuan Guan and then had our phones confiscated. Next were told to sleep but some of them had a discussion which delayed our sleeping time.

Recess Week

10 March 2015

So I’ve been so late that I decided to combine both week into 1 post.

On the Monday, we woke up at 0530. I quickly washed up and went down for meeting Venerable. We had a morning puja and Eight Precept Taking ceremony, which are basically the same as the Five Precept (except the 3rd one become “does not engage in any sexual activity” instead of “sexual misconduct”) + 3 more (doesn’t watch/listen in play/movie/music (entertainment); no meal after midday; and doesn’t sleep in high bed & sit in high chair). We had a seating for around 30 minutes and then the daybreak come. We had a breakfast and then after some rest (very short one), we went to the main shrine. We did meditation in the form of sitting, standing, walking, rest, sitting, walking. And hours have passed. Although in the most seating I can’t concentrate at all since it was really noisy (there was a vehicle cleaning the floor), and hot (I easily perspire when I sat in meditation position, but not when I took rest). But walking is really nice, I never thought that we walked for that long! After this kind of things, we had lunch which is the last meal of the day. Honestly, I don’t really like the veggies served, but I should eat a lot since it will be the last meal of that day. After lunch, we headed back to our room for around 30-mins nap. Then we resumed at 1pm, sitting and walking. Around 3pm, we requested for a “sleeping” and it was granted. At first I can concentrate, but time passed and I felt asleep although I think I was still aware of the surroundings. When the session ended, (since I heard the venerable ending the session) I did not really sure whether I was asleep but the feeling is similar to when I woke up. After a washup, we continued to do sitting meditation until around 5pm in which I really can concentrate on my breath. We we told to have shower and rest for a while before going back to the main shrine. At the main shrine, we had an evening puja and a little Q&A with venerable. After that, we did a sitting and ended the day around 2130. The NTUBS committees had a little meeting with venerable before we went back to sleep. I had quite a trouble in sleeping since I was hungry! After quite some time, I finally fell asleep but I dreamed about me with my family having a reunion, eating together before going somewhere else.

On Tuesday, we woke up again at 0530, did some wash up, and then meeting venerable for a morning puja, a sitting, and then ended the meditation retreat. Next, we had a breakfast (at last, a meal!) and our handphones are being given back again. Whew, 36-hour off and I got 35 e-mails! We then packed up our stuffs before going back (Xin Zhao showed us the Recycling Corner of KMSPKS first). We decided to use bus to Clementi (since there was news that Circle Line was really crowded) and continued the journey using MRT. After arriving in JP, I went to Fairprice to restock (milk, apples, and bread). Going back to samsara (as jokingly said by Venerable), I did various ketchup like reading emails, replying emails, did some stuffs required for my projects, editing Wikipedia, . In the afternoon, I had a CZ2006 Software Engineering group project meeting and then went back, coding, and watching some YouTube videos. (I recently get addicted to CGP Grey’s video, since it was really interesting) Well, people said my YouTube watching pattern was weird: I usually watched educational (Minute Physics, Veritasium, CGP Grey) and Coldplay videos; but rarely on comedy videos.

Wednesday, I woke up quite late and went to Hardware Lab 4 for a free access lab, doing my CZ3001 lab report. After that, I hang around LWN Library before going to HPCC tour. High Performance Computing Centre (HPCC) is a small data center (or even supercomputer), in NTU. We were given a short presentation about its layout before going in to the room that host this computer. It was really noisy but not that hot. Even on the exhaust fan, the air was cool since they installed water cooling at the back of the rack. It was quite nice to know this kind of new knowledge. When I first encountered HPCC, I though it was full and have a lot of computer inside but that day I knew that inside was just around half utilized and got numerous empty space and racks. After this tour, I went back and did lots of coding for the CZ2006 back-end like enabling sending email via external SMTP server via a PHP library. I also got nostalgic and browsed my old photo archive and contributed it to Wikimedia Commons.

On Thursday, I went for my second job interview at Pixnplay, at Tai Seng. The location of the company was quite far from the MRT but the company looks bigger than Healint. Being interviewed in Bahasa Indonesia (since the interviewer is Indonesian) is quite weird. Well, I showcased c4 and Raun to him but he did not look impressed. Towards the end of the interview, he said that I can do the job and offered me the job; but I said that I’ve been offered somewhere else also and haven’t had a decision yet. The interview was really short: 15 minutes. After I came back, I did some coding before going for CNS Programmer meeting, which was lengthy but fruitful. Then I went back to my room (as I swapped slot for the CITS duty since I thought that there will be a dinner with Michael Lie, but turned out everyone can’t make it) and did some other stuffs like coding.

Friday started with CITS duty at OSSAC which was quite nice since it was recess week. There mostly I did nothing productive since I didn’t bring my laptop. After lunch, I went to print and submit documents to OSSAC and went to NYH for meeting WJ and Sherly, for CNS matter, and then went back to my room. I found some easy and interesting bug on Mozilla’s bugzilla and tried out to fix it and merge it to their repo. Around 4pm, I went out for celebrating Teheri’s birthday with NTUBS people, which was just very few who turned out. Then going back, I rested for a while and did some coding before going out again for celebrating Teheri’s birthday with Medanese student which turned out to be quite lengthy.

Saturday started late (with me watching TBBT) but productive as I did lots of coding on this day. This day too I finished the CZ3001 lab report by doing a virtual access (remote desktop connection) to lab for using the software needed, luckily it still worked. :P In the afternoon (around 5pm), I decided to go swimming which I never did for some times already. After my dinner, I spent lots of time watching YouTube’s CGP Grey video since it was quite interesting to get new knowledge.

On Sunday, I went to Buddhist Fellowship’s Special Sunday Service whom the speaker was Ajahn Sumedho, the first Western disciple of Ajahn Chah, and it was REALY CROWDED. Arriving around 1050, I was sent upstairs to BF’s (3rd floor) room which screened live stream from the 2nd floor’s Dharma hall and yet it was still very packed with lots of people. The talk itself was quite general: how we should give up in trying to know everything since it was quite meaningless in spiritual advancement; it was just like meditation which goal was not to gain something but to be aware of the moment; also on everything is impermanent, non-self, and suffering. [quoted some from the summary posted by BF people] After the lunch provided there, I and Rizky went to SUTD (Singapore University of Technology and Design) to attend their Open House, pretending to be incoming uni student :P by bus + MRT to Tanah Merah and then shuttle bus to SUTD.

Well, SUTD building was nicely designed although not as big as NTU (maybe the whole SUTD is just around NS-SS area, with their main buildings was just around NS big [with the spines, N1-N4], without the NS extensions [like N2.1, N4.1, etc]). Nevertheless, we attended the president’s talk who did a nice impression by going into the stage by a small electric vehicle, giving the presentation on 8 reasons why you should join SUTD. On the side note, he also surprised a faculty member for his birthday. Well, quite unconventional but yeah, he made a good impression.

What makes SUTD so different from NTU is the curriculum: SUTD is more multidisciplinary (their first three terms [around 1 year in total] were studying the same foundation) and more on gaining experience: they require most students to take on 2 summer internships. After that, the students we split into “pillars” (like “majors”) and can take various “tracks” (like “specialization”) and finally a “capstone” (like “FYP”) for graduation. And their standard study load was 4 courses per term. What!?!?! 4 courses per term [no tricks, not “Core course”, “4” is including miscellaneous courses like Entrepreneurship, Management, Social Sciences, Economics, Humanities, and Arts (like elective in NTU) ! And yet they graduate in 3.5 years; and also they just study their own major in like their 2nd year. How could this be? When I compare their Computer Science-like “pillar” called ISTD (Informations System Technology and Design), they just study quite basic courses like “Intro to Info System and Programming” (CZ1003 Intro to Computational Thinking + CZ1002 Intro to Computer Systems combined?), “Computation Structures” (CZ1007 Data Structures?), “Intro to Algorithms” (CZ2001 Algorithms?), “Prob & Stats” (CZ1008 Engineering Mathematics?), “Elements of Software Construction” (CZ2006 Software Engineering?), “Computer System Engineering” (CZ1006 Intro to Computer Organization and Architecture + CZ3001 Advanced Computer Architecture?). Besides that, the modules available are for the “tracks” (specialization). Even Artificial Intelligence is on their “tracks” courses while in NTU it was everyone’s core subject. Well, maybe in NTU we just learned too much general stuffs :P Besides the academic stuffs, SUTD had a quite confusing building layout (and we got lost numerous times) and their hall of residence is just like Hall 17 & 18, got small lake (which color is grey-green, compared to Hall 17 & 18’s yellow-brown; albeit their building not standing on the lake but besides it) :P

After the nice and tiring experience in SUTD, we were given free shuttle bus to Tanah Merah (arrived there around 1740) and since I should meet NTUBS MC people at 1800 at Bedok, which was just a station distance, we walked from Tanah Merah MRT station to Bedok MRT station! Turned out to be not a wise decision, firstly, it was far (4 bus stops distance) and rainy (luckily I wore my new shoes which is somewhat waterproof, well my old shoes may get wet if I walked in a wet road, even if it is not raining; and also we brought umbrellas). After we arrived at Bedok, Rizky left me and I met the rest of NTUBS MC people, who took bus with wrong direction and we alighted at Tanah Merah MRT station -__________- Oh no, I walked to Bedok from Tanah Merah to save this 77 cents and then 77 cents were just accidentally spent. After that, we took the bus with correct direction and alighted quite after quite far and walked to the vegan restaurant “Loving Hut” to have a dinner with NTUBS Alumni people. The dinner was nice although quite expensive. Also we exchanged some information from and to the alumni members which one of them explained why NTUBS pay income taxes while other society does not. After the dinner, we went back and arriving at my hall, I did some unproductive stuffs before going to sleep.

 

Week 7, Semester 2

• Journal

3 March 2014

This week, compared to other people, I’m very free, meaning that I got no quizzes on this week, what’s better, my core classes are in e-learning week, meaning that there are no physical lectures and tutorials. …

Week 7, Semester 2Read More »

2013 in Review

• Hopes, Notes

31 December 2013

Many things happened in 2013, just like in 2012. The following lists what have happened to me in 2013:

Here comes the end of 2013, happy new year 2014. This blog is never been this crowded before. Thank you for being an audience of my stories. May the blog be filled with more posts in terms of quantity and quality.

P.S. see my year in review from Facebook.

VI

• Journal

22 September 2013

This week is the 6th academic week in NTU. Overall, this week was relaxing yet tiring.

On Monday, everything went like schedule except after the class we hung out for a while at LWN Library. The next evening, our school club had a subcommittee recruitment day. I applied for IT Officer (first choice) and Special Project Specialist (2nd choice). The interview session was short and straightforward, and that day seemed it was uncrowded.

On Wednesday, we got lab session for CZ1004 (Great Ideas in Computing) again, which was the last compulsory lab session for the course. When I worked part-time, it was very uncrowded as I can use the “free-time” to revise CZ1002 (Introduction to Computing System) course which will held a quiz the next day; but because I had badly very much “free-time”, I revised for HE9091 (Principle of Economics), which I was still confused if I had to make it S/U course or not. After work, I visited the library to return back the book about Human-Computer Interaction and then find a book about web design and checked out one book called “Designing Web Interfaces”. Hope I can read through all of it.

I’m quite busy on Thursday. After the morning lectures, I had a group meeting (and lunch) of the HW0110 (Effective Communication) course. We agreed hat we should meet again next Monday discussing the assignment with preparations such as the points we wanted to put in the report. After that, we got tutorial class, quiz, and lectures. The CZ1002 quiz consists of 2 MCQs, 2 T/F questions, and 4 short-answers. Overall, it was easy but I’m not too sure about the T/F questions.

Friday was fun and stressful. The lab session of CZ1005 (Digital logic) was fun, I’m excited about ‘programming’ the logic design from a computer software then run it at a board. After I had my lunch, I got a group meeting on CZ1004 course, this meeting was quite short but crucial as we come upon the problem that our topic is too vast, and after we ask for advice from our tutor, he also think so. Then we decided to pick one of the topic under Human-Computer Interaction and focus on it. We happened to ‘chop’ the tutorial room and use it for another hour just for finding the suitable topic. We then decided to think of it and suggest a topic to decide on next Monday. I was quite stressful about finding new idea. To relive it, I then ate Matcha McFlurry from McDonald’s, it was a nicely flavored green tea ice cream which I found too sweet to be green tea. At the evening, I got a Dhamma Class II held by NTUBS. The speaker talked about Buddhist practices and what was the steps to be a good Buddhist. After the event, the committee had a mooncake-eating event. Well, it was nice to eat mooncake under a full-moon.

On Saturday, my relatives visited me and after some time, they departed. I then did my part on HW0110, CZ1004, and then finished my CZ1003 (Introduction to Computational Thinking) assignment.

On Sunday, we went to Buddhist Fellowship (West Centrer). There Ven. Rathanasara gave a Dhamma Talk about how to dilute bad karma: by doing many good things, the past-bad actions may not be much affecting us in the future. After the lunch, I went to Fairprice at Jurong Point to buy some goods and then went to hair salon to have my hair cut at Hi Salon at Boon Lay MRT Station for just $3.9. This is the first time I had a hair cut outside Medan, to be exact, I had my hair cut almost all the time at the same barber shop in Medan. In the evening, we went swimming and had dinner at Canteen 1.