Starbucks

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).