OSN – Kenrick's Notes

Hometown (3)

5 January 2014 • Journal

5 January 2013

This is my last week on my hometown before going back to Singapore.

On Monday, Golfin visited me. We chatted for a long time that day sharing each other stories about life as a university student in different places. He also passed me the TOKI shirt which was used by the judges at OSN 2013. After he left, I went to experiment around making animation in the connect-four game.

On Tuesday, which was new year’s eve, I implemented a minimax agent for the connect-four game as an AI, before this, the AI was just a random agent. After that, I wrote about the 2013 in review. Then finally to celebrate new year, I watched a Christmas movie titled “Arthur Christmas”. It was an animation movie from Aardman Animations, the studio which produces Shaun the Sheep. The movie was nicely done.

On Wednesday, I updated the connect-four game’s evaluation function a little bit to make it avoid losing and aim for winning. (but still not perfect as in some instances it will not go for straightly winning the game). By the way, the game is playable at http://kenrick95.github.io/c4. This day I came across some good old games titled “Rise of Nations”. This game as well as the comic book titled “The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck” (in Indonesian, 500 page, haha) killed some times. I spent the rest of time catching up the lectures for coursera.

Thursday and Friday is spent for implementing Server-Sent Events to Raun and to watch lectures on coursera. By the way, I finished 2 week lectures and quizzes on this week as next week I will be joining a camp and can’t do anything else.

On Saturday, I and my friends went out to Sun Plaza to meet up each other. It was a long times since the last time I meet Edward, Leonard, and Roselyn. Although we spent most our times just chatting, overall it was fun like the previous ones. On this day too, my father and mother (and also my uncle) got defrauded by a person who hacked my brother’s Facebook account.

On Sunday, after doing chanting for my grandfather, I and my family went to Carrefour to buy my milk stock. We had lunch at Pizza Hut and dinner at Waringin Seafood.

Next week on Monday I will have returned back to Singapore. Hope that the NTUBS Dhamma Camp 2014 will be fun.

2013 in Review

31 December 2013 • Hopes, Notes

31 December 2013

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

January: The New Year holiday was spent with family and friends. After that I focused on the university entrance examinations. In end of January, NUS UEE was held.
February: After NTU UEE in early February, here comes the Chinese New Year (packed with The Wonder of Science).
March: I GOT ACCEPTED TO NTU! Besides, the school held the final school exam. I also held a mini programming contest at the programming club.
April: I went to Jakarta to attend NTU Scholarship Interview, but I failed to get the scholarship. This month is the last month of studying in high school (my story of last day of school). After we got a national examinations, the school held a prom nite and our class held a farewell trip.
May: the starting point of the transition from a high school student to a university student. I’ve done my CS188.1x: Artificial Intelligence, taught programming at the programming club, joined TWoS, restarted my LM project, started Introduction to Pyschology, and resurrecting the desktop computer. Like last year, I posted my thoughts for Vesak Day. By the way, I got the news that I’ve passed the National Examination.
June started with me getting my report card and National Examination results; going for the first photo session with Mr. Johnson; continuing Introduction to Psychology; starting First Year Composition 2.0; stopping LM2 and starting LM2C. Next weeks, I continued the MOOCs; SSEC meeting (which resulted in drafting a “constitution”); and met seniors of NTU in an informal meeting.
On July, I started many things while some old ones are finished or discontinued. On the 3rd week, my form-teacher, Mr. Manaek Nababan, passed away. On the last week of July, I tidied my stuffs; and started to supervise PJJ OSN.
On August, I arrived at NTU, joined PINTU’s FOC, started many first things. Many events we held on the first weeks, e.g. NTUSU Welcome Week, NTUBS Welcome Tea, NTUBS subcomm recruitment, NTU OSS Welcome Tea, Hall XI Welcome Tea, NTUBS AGM, PINTU’s T-SPRAY.
On September, OSN 2013 was held, this time I was watching the scoreboard movements hoping that my juniors can score well. Then, I bought new laptop! Also ordered a Microsoft Surface RT. I was getting more and more busier this month, hopefully the end of September is e-learning week and then recess week.
My birthday is on October, and got celebrated. I finished many assignments, collected my Surface RT, then attended NTUBS Committee Day. End of October is the pre-climax of my semester.
November started with the climax of my semester: quizzes, speech assignment, and presentation which I survived all of them. After that, the weeks are quite relaxing. The last classes were held, and there comes the revision week which ended with a first examination. November ended with more examinations.
December started with the passing of my grandfather and the end of examinations, also the very first Indonesian SCE freshies outing. Before going back to my hometown, I joined a 4-day bootcamp held by NTU Ventures with speaker from Mozilla. In my hometown, the weeks are spent variously on playing games, developing game, and joining MOOC.

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.

IV

8 September 2013 • Journal

8 September 2013

This year’s National Science Olympiad (OSN) was held on this week, too. As always, I’m interested in monitoring the event of OSN in Informatics. It was heart-beating to monitor the public scoreboard of my juniors (and my supervisees). I somewhat could not concentrate on the lectures while I see the scoreboard. I just want them to get a medal and go to the training camp (Pelatnas). At last, Chalvin (from my province, different school; also joined OSN last year but did not get a medal) got a bronze medal; Febrian and Agus (my supervisee) got a bronze medal, Alva (friend of my supervisee who like to communicate with me) got a silver medal; William (my supervisee) did not get a medal; Andi (from my province, different school) did not get any medal, but I’m sure that his score almost made it to get a medal.

This week we got our first meeting in CZ1004: Great Ideas in Computing team (FS2 Team 2) at the double-screen monitor PC at Lee Wee Nam Library on Friday afternoon before the tutorial class, it was quite a short meeting but we brainstormed some ideas and shared the workload of the tasks.

NTU Buddhist Society on Friday evening held its Investiture, the ceremony of passing the positions from the 30th committees to the newly elected 31th committees. That day serves as my first day on duty as a NTUBS Resource Subcom as I helped bringing stuffs to NTUBS cabinet at Nanyang House.

This week marks my laptop’s 4th anniversary, which was bought in 4 September 2009. That time, the laptop, Acer Aspire 4810T, was quite cheap with mid-high specs: 320GB HDD, LED display, and 2GB RAM; what I did not know is, the processor is quite slow so it can conserve battery power more. The battery-saving mode was splendid, I ever run into using battery only for around 8 hours. Over years, the battery condition was still good too: it can still be used for 5 hours, with wi-fi.

On Saturday, I went to Comex at Singapore Expo (very far from NTU) to buy a new laptop, which will replace my current laptop. This laptop is Asus S46CB which features high-end specifications with reasonable price and it got ‘Ultrabook’ label. But I’ve tested the battery, the capacity is just around 2 hours. I need to adapt to this new environment and moves the data from the old one to the new one quickly. By the way, this post is the first post written at the new laptop.

On Thursday, I attended the NTU Student Union Recruitment Drive interview. I did quite bad at the interview for the design team as I couldn’t answer most of the questions asked and hey, for the logistics team interview, I did well; the results will be posted next Monday. Hope that I can quickly secure a hall point of 5 quickly. On Sunday, we went to Buddhist Fellowship to attend the Sunday service and went shopping at Fairprice, Jurong Point. Overall, this week is quite tiring but still fun, may the spirit of first week still burns!

2 September 2012: OSN 2012 (1)

2 September 2012 • Journal

2 September 2012

On this day, I woke up before 7 am, which my alarm rang at 7. After cleaned myself and had breakfast (instant noodle). After all preparations were finished, suddenly my luggage’s code changed unexpectedly. My dad’s do the linear search from 000 to 999, luckily get it at around 500 and changed it back to where it supposed to be. Now it was around 8.45, we were told to get there before 9. Well, I arrived on time, meeting the others, and also the guys from North Sumatra’s Ministry of Education and Culture. They asked us to sign a legal document showing that we received the ticket for the aircraft and the money for the taxi which in reality we didn’t even use any taxi.

Around 10 we were called in to the check-in room, taking some photos, and to waiting room. We boarded the aircraft, which was Garuda Indonesia Airlines. Wow, it was very cool! Every seat was occupied with a touch-sensor monitor. The safety demonstration was screened on it. Also, every seat is provided with a headset. The monitor also provides music, film, books, etc. In this flight, I choose to watch “Assasins” but before finished, I switched to listen to Coldplay’s Mylo Xyloto album which makes me very excited that time. The in-flight meal was okay, I got “fish noodle”, with Wall’s ice cream and free drink (a cup of bottled guava). Well, I also use the lavatory at the rear side, as usual, the lavatory was nice, haha.

The song “Don’t Let It Break Your Heart” ended the flight, after the song ended, the monitor was automatically turned off for landing process.

After landed at Terminal 2, we took a photo, which we are told to use the batik that were given that time. Next we picked up our baggage and went out to rendezvous with Bram and Jason. At a bench outside the terminal building, we were told to wait for a bus to take us to our hotel.

Waiting and waiting, I’m very thirsty, I went to A&W after gained permission from the guys from MoEnC and bought a small-cup of coke.

The bus came, we took the bus, first it stopped at Terminal 1 to pick up another OSN participant from other region. The journey took a long time. My father telephoned me, wow it was around 3 pm already, asking me about my conditions, etc. First the bus stopped at Hotel Kartika, which are for the participant of maths, physics, chemistry, and biology subject; then the bus stopped at Hotel Kaisar which are for the rest (computer, geoscience, economics, and astronomy).

We directly went to the second floor which the re-registration process was held. It took a little wait because the participant of computer subject from Jakarta just arrived and just in front of our queue. Well, the consists of 9 students; while ours just 2. After these things, we were given a room to stay. I got room 639, the same room with Vincent Immanuel, from SMAK BPK Penabur 1 Jakarta; while Peter got room at fourth floor (room 426) with Raja, from Middle Java. (pun: sleep at Hotel Kaisar with Raja; sleep at Caesar Hotel with King; haha)

Then I and Peter went to 7-Eleven to buy stuffs (I bought 2 1,5L-bottle of water). Well, the 7-Eleven is just in the opposite of the hotel. When we went back we met Jason and Bram.

I went back to my room just to find that my roommate wasn’t there, I was told to wait his return at his friend’s room at 637. There I met his friend, Arnold Ardianto, from Kolese Kanisius, Jakarta. Time passed and my roommate found me at 637. I quickly took a bath then went out to met the others at the 2^nd floor.

After the quick dinner, I, Peter, and Jason waited for the others at the lobby but they didn’t show up so we went up to search them. In front of the room happened a crazy action by Peter called “Pendekar sandal terbang”: he threw his sandal to the air from one of his foot with his foot and caught the sandal by one hand. He did this to show his angriness to Juliana’s inconsistency: she decided to join with us and then cancelled the joining. Haha, at last she and Vina joined us. We went to 7 Eleven (again). There I met Vincent, Arnold, and their friends paying at the cashier and intended to go back to the hotel. There, I bought Slurpee (small) for the first time; nah… the second time, but this is the first time I did it correctly. Before this, I had bought it in Singapore long time ago, I think it was in December 2006. My brother bought one for himself and my father asked if I wanted one, I agreed and just taken one that was not ready to serve, the result is: the delicious Slurpee was just a regular coke.

After I, Peter, Juliana, and Jason bought what we need, we had a table outside the store. Here we shared many things including our personal feelings about others. We chatted until around 8. We went back to the hotel cause Jason worried about Bram. In the lobby, we continue the sharing. I felt that I wanted to sleep and went back to my room and again, Vincent hasn’t got back. I phoned him but got no answer. After some time I went back to the lobby and find out that Chalvin had joined us. After some time, I found out that 3 of Indonesian IOI 2012 team (TOKI 2012; Irvin, Nathan, Aji, and Cakra; I recalled that Cakra didn’t came) had visited the hotel, Peter went to greet them. Around 9.30 I found out that Vincent had got back and passed us, I told him to wait me at our room.

Around 10, I have arrived at 639. Inside there was Vincent and Arnold. I overheard them talking about Irvin (TOKI 2012) and Sharon Lynn (another participant from Jakarta) ever been in a relationship and Irvin that night had obliged to meet her. Well, after some time Arnold went back to his room accompanied by Vincent, for I had to sleep. Around 11 if I’m not mistaken, I heard Vincent went back to our room and slept.