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Of cars and such

Published on February 9, 2008 in General, Ramblings and School. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , , , , , .

This post was supposed to be posted on chu xi (CNY eve), but I never really got down to typing it. Lazy me as usual. So now, you get this post, plus whatever I have to add on for the past few days! I had to go school on CNY eve, how sad is that? Working people got like half day off and could go home around 12-1pm, but I had lessons from 12-4pm! The lectures were kinda empty, either because people thought that they did not have to go for lectures, or because they blatantly chose to ignore the fact that they had to go for lectures.

Anyway, on my way home, there was a massive traffic jam on the CTE. I thought that it was due to people rushing home for their tuan yuan fan (reunion dinner), or maybe it was because certain roads around chinatown were closed, and so people were forced onto the CTE. It was highly unusual for a traffic jam on CTE at 4pm on normal days. However, when just before the PIE exit, I saw 5-6 cars along the shoulder of the expressway, and most of them weren’t in very good shape. I can only imagine there was a 5-6 chain accident, since most of the cars seem to have either their front or rear or both smashed. I guess that explains the accident. I wonder if the upcoming ERP gantries will prevent jams due to accidents and such. “85% of motorists will have a smoother ride”. “Road tax prices will be reduced”. “CEO prices will be reduced.” What they don’t tell you is ERP gantries will be come up by the dozens, so you should buy a car, pay instalments, and not drive it. One thing the Government is wrong about though, a car is not a luxury item, driving a car is. This podcast from Mr Brown more or less sums it up all.

Also, on my way home, I had to pump petrol, since my tank was already on the reserve fuel and anymore travelling without refueling would need me to get down and push my bike to the nearest petrol station. Going past the petrol stations, I saw many cars trying to turn into the stations, and I was wondering why. Then I realised most of them were turning in to get their car washed, and so promptly went ahead and zoomed into the petrol station to refuel my bike. I wonder why everyone needs to wash their car on the eve of CNY. Is it because of some unspoken tradition, or simply because of a “since everyone else is doing it, I must do it too” mentality. Who cares anyway? My bike is washed my nature, and I don’t really take the effort of washing it :P

Anyway day 1 of CNY was uninteresting. Went Bai Nian-ing at a few places, and proceeded home to sleep. I also tried learning how to play a guitar, since Joanne passed me her guitar. My fingers hurt now, and I’m trying to play Ronan Keating’s When You Say Nothing At All. Oh well, I can play up to the chorus now, but more practice is definitely needed. I don’t really like playing chords, since it seems like playing twister with my fingers, and my fingers are too fat! :( The 2nd day of CNY wasn’t all the interesting too, but after dinner at my cousin’s place, I got together with my cousins and talked for a few hours about stuff. We only see each other once a year, so the talk was definitely good for catching up and stuff. Anyway, after that we decided to go back to my uncle’s house, where it looked more like a makeshift gambling den. The younger generation (my cousins and I) proved we weren’t that lousy at gambling after all. At the end of the day, I won $40, Mei Ching won $115, and Kian Ann won $15. $40 wasn’t too bad for my 15 rounds of ban luck (chinese version of blackjack) after all…

Nothing much…

Published on January 23, 2008 in Ramblings and School. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

School has started, but not in full swing yet. However, being the hardworking person that I am, I have been spending quite some time on my GEM1501 assignments, though Lab has not started. There’s a total of 28 assignments, and I have already finished 19 of them. However, I’m pretty much stuck on the 20th one, so there goes my chance of finishing them all :( I wanted to finish them all to lighten my load on Thursdays, which are the days I have lessons pretty much from 9 to 6, except for an hours’ break at 4pm. So, if any kind soul wants to help me with the assignment, you can check it out here. It’s done in javascript, so it should be quite easy, but the problem is not with the javascript programming, but rather with the logic or the thinking through of the problem :P

Didn’t go to work yesterday, because my boss fired me for one day! She was on MC on Monday and didn’t have time to prepare work for me. How ironic is that? I mean, I thought by my going to work I should lessen the workload for them, but since they need to prepare work for me, I guess I’m causing them more work?! Maybe I should work slower in the future, and prevent these situations from surfacing again! Yea, I’m considerate this way, so don’t think I’m making excuses when I work slowly okay?!

And, last but not least, someone tried to kill me today! I was on my way to school, and was going a road when this car wanted to turn right out of NUH carpark. So he inched out, and stopped. It’s important to emphasize that he stopped, since if he carried on I would have been forewarned that an idiot was going to turn out without caring about oncoming traffic and I would slow down. However, he stopped, so I mistook that for him being not an idiot and that he stopped cause he saw the oncoming traffic. Apparently, he was only checking the left side for traffic, and didn’t care to look to the right. I mean, who the f*** turns right and not check for traffic from the right. So there I was, thinking that he was not the idiot I thought he would be, and almost knocked into his car and flew. Thankfully, SSDC did teach me well, and I applied an emergency brake and slowed down, and managed to avoid him. And I didn’t even horn that guy too. I think I underuse my horn too much, as I hardly horn other road users when it is blatantly clear they are in the wrong. Oh well, at least if I did fly I would have been just outside NUH?

One more random thing to add: Raw broccoli is not nice. Somethings are nice when eaten raw, whereas for broccoli, let’s just say they taste better when cooked. Raw broccolis just taste too… green.

I Love NUS!

Published on January 17, 2008 in General, Ramblings and School. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

Gotta love NUS, for screwing me up over and over again. First it was CORS, but that was nothing. Now it’s the school administration, or the school of computing, or whoever makes decisions that tutorial slots can be changed at their whim or fancy. Yes, they decided to change the tutorial slots available for bidding of one of the modules to some other days. The worse thing was that I didn’t know about it until I decided to browse through the module info page to see my planned slot GONE. And the worser thing was that the only 2 days they had tutorials on were my working days. And the worsest thing was that I had to bid for another module at Round 3B (2nd last round of bidding). And the worserest thing was that I used up ALL my points for a module I could have probably gotten for less than 100 points in earlier rounds. Yes, all 4388 of my points, which leaves me with exactly… 0 points left in my programme account. Oh well, at least I take comfort in the fact that going to school for my Statistics lecture is a good cure for insomnia…

Anyway, I had my wisdom tooth extracted yesterday. All the horror stories I have heard, about the pain and the amount of money you need to spend. Well, I can say that my experience wasn’t that bad. Only paid $77, and the extraction took all of 10 minutes. So, I went to the dentist at around 4:20pm. Sat on the dental chair, and let the dentist do some routine checking. After she checked, she injected me with 2 injections of anaesthetic, and waited for around 5 minutes. After that, she said she would test first, and before I knew it my wisdom tooth was out. I guess I’m one of the luckier ones who don’t have wisdom teeth that grow at odd angles and where you need to cut your gem to get the tooth out.

Also, had my 9 to 6 marathon in school today. Would have had only 1 hour of break at 4pm, but my lab sessions have not started so I had 3 hours of break. Therefore, I went to the computer lab to do some surfing and chatting, and customizing my PortableApps FireFox. PortableApps is a cool idea which lets you install applications on your usb drive which you can bring to different computers to use. But I digress. I was spending most of my time reading http://419eater.com/, which is a site which does scambaiting. Basically it is about how they scam people, mostly those Princes from Nigeria, who send you emails that they want to give you 1 million. So it’s like giving them a taste of their own medicine. Anyway, on my way home, I saw something funny. Something was walking on the expressway pushing his bike in the opposite direction. He was probably pushing it to the exit before, possibly because no one told him that ERP changed and there was a gantry before the Upper Serangoon exit on CTE.

School’s back!

Published on January 14, 2008 in School. 0 Comments Tags: , .

So, school’s back, together with all the boring lectures and stuff. Nothing much to mention today, except maybe about the stats GEM lecture I’m taking. GEM stands for General Elective Module, or something along that lines. When I first entered the lecture hall, I thought it was rather small for a class of 350. True enough, as more people started to flood into the lecture hall, some ended up seating on the steps and stuff. However, there’s something the university administration probably knew that I didn’t, which was that the lecturer was boring as hell, and that the number of people attending subsequent lectures will lessen. Kudos to the uni team for having this foresight, and also kudos to the lecturer for being the first to put me to sleep in 2008!

After my 6 hours marathon of lectures, I met Jing Xian to get Econs notes and textbook from her, and headed home in the rain. On my way home, I gotta say that the rain I experienced was the heaviest I ever saw! The visibility was about 5-10 meters and as for the lightning, all I can say is that you wouldn’t be surprised if you got struck by it… And no, I didn’t do any big wrongs the past few days… not that I know of anyway! However, when I was reaching AMK Ave 1 along the CTE, there was no rain. I wished it didn’t rain near to school and rained around my house, rather than the other way round. I know you might think the amount of rain would be the same, but you can’t be more wrong. If it rained nearer to my house, I would just get wet and reach home. For the other scenario, which I experienced today I might add, you would get wet at the start, then have no rain for the rest of the journey. What you might forget would be that you would still be wet from the rain, and riding on a bike at 90kmph (around there at least) all wet is no fun at all!

How to make yourself worried for nothing

Published on January 9, 2008 in School. 1 Comment Tags: , , .

Today is the great CORS bidding day of Round 2A. Basically, CORS is the bidding system for NUS (my university) for us to get our modules allocated to us. Anyway, no need for the great background history of CORS, but straight to the point. I was bidding for 2 modules today, and the round ends at 5pm. So at around 445pm, I checked and saw that a module with 350 vacancies had 400+ bidders, and another module with 50 vacancies had 30+ bidders. So, naturally, I wanted to lower the bid for the latter module and increase my bid for the first one. My 1st module had 1000 points and my 2nd module had 307 points at the start. And here’s what followed:

* withdraws bid of 307 points from the 2nd module, since stupid CORS won’t let you lower the bid, but only lets you withdraw and bid again

* system slows to a crawl, and dies on me

* logs in to CORS again, and see that my bid point for 2nd module is 0, but my points left is 0 too

* panic starts to set in

* logs in again to see if problem will be rectified

* sees a message that the bid round has ended, checks clock and handphone to see that the time is only 450pm

* GREATER panic sets in

* dials CORS helpline to ask them what is going on

me: Hi, the CORS website says that the bid round has ended, but it’s not 5pm yet.

CORS helpdesk girl: The system was experiencing some problems earlier on, but it should be rectified now.

* logs in again, and sees that the round time has not ended, but remaining points left is still 0

me: I tried withdrawing a bid earlier, to increase the bid of another module, but my points seem to have been eaten up by the system

CORS girl: Please give me your details…

me: (details given)

CORS girl: Ok I’ll help you get your points refunded, but I don’t think I can do it before 5pm.

me: So there’s nothing I can do? I have 1 module with 1000 points and my other module has 0 points left.

CORS girl: Maybe you can try bidding for it in another round?

me: Should I withdraw the other module, to have points to bid for my 2nd module? I’m scared my points will be eaten up again, and I will have 0 points left with no modules.

CORS girl: The system should be rectified now, so you should get your points if you withdraw now.

me: Ok… Thanks for your help.

* abit angry with the system for eating up my points

* withdraws 1000 points from 1st module to bid 900 points to the 1st module and 100 points to the 2nd module

So, at the end of the round, I went from 1000 points and 307 points to the modules to 900 points and 100 points to the module. So much for trying to increase my chances of getting the modules. I know the CORS girl couldn’t do much, since she probably wasn’t in charge of the system or anything, but I was kinda angry that I had less points at the end of it and there was nothing I could do about it. Thankfully, that was not the end of it all, in a good sense that is.

* Receives call at 515pm from CORS girl

CORS girl: Hi, we know the round has ended, but since you were affected by the problem with the system, we decide to help you change your bid accordingly. We see that you’ve bidded 100 points for your 2nd module, so…

me: (gives details on changes to be made)

me: Thanks for your help.

So in the end, I did indeed get my bid of 1207 and 100 points for the respective modules. But, alas, my worry was all for nothing anyway, and I probably would have been better off not bothering about the bids in the first place. I got my 1st module for 301 points, and my 2nd module for 1 point. So much making myself worried for nothing…