more like booooring week~

monday. was told to attend a 10am msc meeting. i came at 9.40 for a bite. and at 10am i had to sms to find out the meeting was pushed to 5pm. not funny. is it such a chore to inform people in advance?

spent time in the library writing INNK notes. then met up with john, johnny, and tortai for lunch. they were heading to IFCTech assessment, so i tagged along, since studying alone is rather dull. spent most of the day at IFCTech lab. johnny was still doing last minute debugging. their program wouldn't work on john's nokia. so they used my k750 for assessment. went to library again after that to study a bit more before the meeting.

the meeting was about the upcoming .NET Bootcamp, which lasts 3 days this time round. we have more applicants than lab capacity, so the meeting was all about deciding numbers.

tuesday. singtel guy came over to do a line test, cause i'm paying for a 1.5mbps link and seeing 512k speeds. traced the problem to my 2nd router. appears that WDS-bridged routers have a problem with carrying forward my full bandwidth when their wireless transmit rates are set to auto. the distance between them was obviously too far to maintain 54mbps, so i had to downgrade the link to 18mbps to enjoy my full 1.5mbps.

the rest of the day continued finishing up my INNK notes. they added up to a record 8 pages. and thats only the summary i'm making notes for

wednesday. proposed the idea of having my class come over my place for a study session. i told tortai to help me broadcast. that bugger didn't. so i had to mass-sms myself on tuesday night. that bugger himself didn't turn up on wednesday. actually only john and johnny did. and john still doesn't have an identity since losing his wallet. he got denied from activating his ATM card at POSB cause he couldn't prove he was himself lol! :x and he'll need to bring his passport along to the exams for the same reason anyway, continued with INNK. managed to complete two past-year papers.

thursday. project room 9. with tianshun and friend. 10am to 5pm. wireless tech. 4 pages of notes. two past-year papers. headache subject. i still don't like engineering, but at least this subject is somehow relevant to my life.

friday. project room 3. same people. same timeframe. (yeah we used quite a bit of technique and resources to get this much booking :x) agenda: IA, the subject that wouldn't make sense. lecture notes that contradict themselves on the same slide. what more can i say. i skipped quite a number of lectures for this sub, so i had to teach myself everything i missed. quite alright. lets hope the paper doesn't turn out as senseless as the term test one.

that sums up. pretty boring eeh? better get over next week asap and i better start on edd soon. like tomorrow soon

for people too lazy to scroll back to the entry where i initially posted this. here it is again:

i have decided to go for the position at sun. thought about it for quite some time. i was thinking.. they wanted me to submit my schedule for the next 8 weeks, which i'm having my holidays.. so i take up my usual temp job for office hours. then i try running for sun in my free time. these 8 weeks happen before my MP/SIP commences, so for the time being i do not need to worry about having to clear the sh!t of my team mates who can't produce any decent work. if, say at the end of 8 weeks i decide that i can't handle the workload, or worst case scenario they fire me (fyi no one has done that before), then i pocket 2 months of salary and add an entry into my resumé. not a bad deal even for a tryout basis!

and so, i emailed both appie (from sun) and elaine (from bizedge). though i felt a little impulsive about the way i did it. but anyway, lets just hope for good news

updates since tuesday: had edd assessment on wednesday. wasn't perfect since i completely forgot to catch all possible "itchy hand" exceptions. only remembered to catch a few plus i was the only person in my team who could answer any question at all. i admit, every line of code was written by me. but i already explained and reexplained and reexplained again all my algorithms and site flow to them. some people simply won't put in any effort to score for an assessment.

after edd, hopped down to sun's office at central mall for an interview. discussed about two types of positions: either technical administration (secreterial work) or technical projects involvement. i don't really see myself in any secretary-like position, but the technical projects mentioned and my supposed involvement was really overwhelming, and i seriously doubt my personal ability to conform to those progress schedules. crazy dilemma after considering my SIP/MP team mates and what they can possibly deliver. life is unfair. i want a power team

wednesday night. chiong IA. chiong until really cannot make it. too much was not done and i couldn't possibly choke up that amount of research and implement my ideal solution in time. so i have only half my supply chain software utilising the database.

thursday morning (+2/3am) hanmei and ruyuan managed to help me do up my techent business plan and financial statements. HUGE THANK YOU goes out to the both of them, who transformed my bound-to-fail 7 page report into a kick-ass 35 page business plan i slept at 4am, after editing, compiling, and printing everything. then i woke up at 7am and got geared up again.

first thing of the day was IA assessment. managed to spoof my lecturer into believing the hard-coded part of my program actually interfaced with the database, by showing him the working register and login sections first. he seemed impressed. optical illusions are so fun. well, until he goes through my source code anyway.

the day followed with bleak networking lecture and tutorial, both lecturers i personally vote to be most boring speakers of the sem, since both are monotones who enjoy speaking to themselves (not to mention laugh at themselves occasionally with the rest of the audience staring wide-eyed).

come TechEnt presentation. mine didn't really go ideally. i liked the elements in some other teams. but all in all, it wasn't *that* bad~

after school met up with hanmei and ruyuan to come to my place to wrap up their MOI. its the least i could do to repay that big big business plan favour. targeted 9pm completion time, but ended up finishing at 11+. i hope they score tomorrow

will be going back to school tomorrow for INNK assessment. i still have slight problems with my network, which i hope to iron out completely in that 3 hours of free access before assessment. wish me luck that will be my final project submission for the semester. ~whew~

first off, some entertainment.. luke sent me this. canon in d, rock edition.

been cramped to my neck lately with projects. every sem i can tell you i'm dead serious busy this time. and every sem it gets worse. i don't know why this sem is so screwed. everything is crammed to the end.

i usually didn't have to really rush things out the day before (or hours before, judging from the crazy hours i sleep) something was due. when i used to say i was rushing something, i still had some buffer time in between submission. this sem everything is done on impromptu basis, theres just no time to sit and wait for something nice to happen. everything is dump, settle, go, present, next project, etc etc.. for the first time in history, i didn't eat at home for a week. everyday i was staying back in school to settle one thing or another.

i was so glad i settled IFCTech on time, ahead of everyone else, until my lecturer decided it was wise to extend the deadline. -pissed- then i settled EDD on monday, will be presenting tomorrow. should be my fav subject this sem

TechEnt stinks. i can't tell u how much i hate business and i had to be itchy handed enough to pick the finance chapters of the business plan. and so, i swapped projects with hanmei. she had a BZE project on an eCommerce website which needed a database. like they are business people, and were never taught anything past HTML, so how the hell you expect them to churn out a site like that? and so, i left my TechEnt business plan in better hands :x

INNK i'm not as confident as i was for RoSw last sem. lots of concepts i don't understand fully and looks like my phase 4 is pretty screwed. plus the lab is a haystack of faulty routers. rather annoying.

tomorrow after EDD assessment i will be heading down to sun's office for interview. wish me luck

i getting more and more irked at my project teams. why can't everyone think like me? okay stupid question. more like why can't everyone put in the right attitude in learning like me? i admit i slack a lot and depend heavily on my background and ability to understand programming. however, if your brain does not understand concepts as quickly as mine, can't you friggin put in more effort and bloody contribute!?

its like the only thing i can assign to them is the design portion, and even then they don't understand the concept of standardisation. if things are not standardised, the entire package looks like a big mess. thats one major thing that my school did not enforce teaching on. thats why people write code that is in such a mess it looks more complex than what it actually is.

i quote darren from msc: "tp does not produce software engineers, they produce software construction workers". i can see the analogy linked rather closely to the state of my new house. (considering i just found out i couldn't place my chic ikea lamp beside my bed cause the power points didn't have power ) most people have the "heck care la~ can work can already" attitude rather than the "how efficient is this and how can i improve it?" attitude, which is pretty sad.

slap on top of that, that my class believes in power distribution, the pathetic mindset of not abandoning the weak, and distributing the *good* people equally among the teams and not together. what am i to say against an eager consensus?

as a result this sem i am just about doing everything myself. today i had an overdose on java.. was meeting my INNK team at 10, but i came at 8.30 to see how much more code i could write for IFCTech. and i was rather satisfied, managed to write a fair bit of logic to pass assessment at 3pm.

so here i am back home now. with the rest of the class having 4 days to celebrate chinese new year and churn out more progress at the same time, while i will be at bangkok again, for the umteenth time. i honestly do not want to go, and have no idea why my family isn't already sick of the place. oh well, thats life. off to driving~

some of you might have received an email about the national survey from NIE if you did it (or were forced to do it) last year. seems like i was right when i checked dissatified about my health. i'm down with a very bad cold again. like i wake up to minor colds just about every morning, and i get struck by major ones probably once a month or more. (although i suspect this time 2 classmates of mine were spreading the virus. damn my immunity)

so i left school early just now. i am never in any mood or shape to work given my state. skipped a useless lecture and a rather important lab. without an MC. well i have perfect attendence records anyway. i hope my networking team aren't dying at settling phase 4.

and yeah, i'm still procrastinating about getting some regular exercise. lived a year plus just 5 minutes from east coast park and i rarely exploited the convenience von suggests more fruity intake and tortai goes for the man-made edition (vit c tabs) i better start trying

suddenly my involvement with microsoft skyrockets. this entry is going to be very microsoft, so don't read it if you have a problem with them. anyway, a few months back, my java lecturer recommended me to join the microsoft student champs program. but back then i was a little hesistant about time commitments, so i didn't even make it to the microsoft interview. i took my second shot at the program on wednesday, went through the interview and got selected along with 5 others~

so thursday i paid their oh-so-cool office my first visit. rushed there from school to attend a Small Business Server user group meeting. wasn't really relevant to what i do, but a learning experience to a cheaper enterprise alternative to windows server for small companies.

friday after driving i was supposed to be writing java the whole day, since my lecturer is going to kill me come monday when he learns that i have zero project progress to show him. ended up not knowing what to write and doing more research and drawing diagrams.

proceeded to school after that for a talk by a fellow student champ on hacking. the vietnamese dude is a NUS student and puts MVP and CEH under his name. pretty impressive save for the fact that most people couldn't understand his accent. but i was fine since i did quite a lot of reading on that topic in my "younger days" =x

today: second visit, first student champs meeting. talk was about security again, this time by a microsoft intern and much more in-depth. followed by a lab session on Visual Studio Team System (VSTS), which is a really cool solution for projects in which communication between team members is really crucial. lunch was pizza on the house. they ordered A LOT. then we wrapped up the lab but i didn't really finish it.

the meeting afterwhich involved each of the schools IHLs presenting the events they had organised since the last meeting and upcoming events. this is a regular section i guess. then the new folks (the 6 of us) got their welcome kits, which included two random ms press books (i got C# and ADO.NET), WebDev Express (which i already have), and another cd containing tonnes of msdn material. plus they're going to print namecards for us the veteran champs got themselves a ready to rock launch kit each, which included the original VS05 itself *envy* should not have hesistated a few months back

after that we headed to east coast park for BBQ. it was organised as a welcome party of some sort for the 6 of us. pretty good. ace makes a great BBQ chef. he cooks good stuff honest :p so i had my fill, and here i am back home. gonna catch some winks~

generally feeling more and more tired these days. i am still not very happy about my place. the banglahs are still around to wrap up work but it seems that progress is moving at a bloody slow speed. there are still no mirrors in the toilets. lots of interior features not completed yet. and because of the continued work, the floor is always dusty even though it is cleaned repeatedly. i don't even feel like unpacking some stuff cause theres work to be done on my table and no ones doing anything. my room is classified lower priority i guess. and the worst part is that there is no proper network connectivity. the wireless reception from my router sitting in dad's study is total crap. if the contractor wasn't so screwed up i would have insisted on LAN cabling up the house with patch panels in each room and i will probably be waiting ages for my simple request of drilling a hole at the back corner of my table for my wires to run through. maybe just thinking about this mess is getting me more tired.

project progress is status quo. i am breaking records for being at the helm of one man shows. can't i simply be entitled to having the privilege of working with team mates who actually know their stuff? this is sooooooo frustrating. and i am also breaking records for having more people approach me for help in their projects (plenty of non-ifc people too). but i know my priorities. the word busy redefines its intensity every semester.

and theres always depressant number 3, exam schedule release:

this sem they want to bake me twice in the sports hall

finally i got my last paper back. the extra wait for school of IT papers are annoying. anyway here goes:

EDD: 94/100
INNK: 35.5/40
InetApl: 44/50
Wireless: 37.5/50

as always, i'm not particularly satisfied with some. i classify people into those whom i am comfortable losing to and those i am not. somehow, i haven't gotten over the fact that i no longer have an edge over the rest

and yeah, the weather still sucks. this monsoon ups the depression level. internet will be cut off tonight and restored at dunbar walk tomorrow. i still haven't packed my stuff yet although mr indian owner is going to kick us out this weekend. grrr..

first off, the weather sucks. oh yeah as if you didn't already know that.

been busy moving stuff back to dunbar walk lately. (read: every night) the official moving-in date is 15th Jan 2006, marked auspicious by some cheena tradition. my voice telephone line has been cut and shifted over already, but who the heck calls me at that number anyway. the internet line will move this friday, and i have to be there to test the connectivity. but i have makeup lab that day as well, and driving right after. its not always nice to be an unpaid full-time network administrator.

i'm also in the midst of rushing projects. not much time to do much. this sem i have more one-man shows to cover. my teams suck so much i feel like writing only my name on the submissions. and this sem more people are looking for me to help them in their projects. nothing new. except this sem all these people are not from my course. i can't write you know who you are cause none of them read this page :p

blah blah blah. ultra stressed period.