A Better Title

The past few days have been pretty hectic, as always, but I sure did learn a lot. Here are some highlights of what happened the past few days.

Tuesday, 22 May 2007

My NTU tutor went to the company to collect my report and logbook. It also marks the end of my academic responsibility for the industrial attachment (IA) program. From then on it would be just me and the company! Yay! Oh yeah, and I’m extending my IA for a month to complete the tool that I am developing there, but from now on there will be no more logbook or reports to do.

Thursday, 24 May 2007

It was BlogOut! The event was not too bad considering it was the first time it was being organised by the folks at The Digital Movement. However one grouse I had was that in the beginning, people didn’t seem to pay attention to the emcee, and speakers. Perhaps like some people pointed out, it was because of the environment which was more conducive for discussion, which was apparent in the latter discussion segment that went pretty well.

Friday, 25 May 2007

It was half day at work! The next half day was spent at Qian Hu fish farm, and I did live mobile blogging at my moblog. Do check out some of the archived entries and let me know of your comments. Dinner was at Ellenborough Market Cafe, Swissôtel Merchant Court, courtesy of the company. The buffet was great, with a wide selection of food from all over the world such as the very fresh sashimi, chicken masala, to seabass. I had free-flow iced tea, and had my first try at beer. Unfortunately, until now I still can’t understand what’s so good about beer.

I went down to NTU after that for VillageTalk, and was just in time for the last two speakers. Unfortunately, they were talking about politics, and I was too tired to actually listen attentively anyway. I can’t wait to see the videos later when they’re uploaded, heard from the rest that the other speakers are very inspiring.

Then I sent Nicole home, and had my first try at riding the Night Rider service. Normally I’ve been taking cabs from her house whenever it was too late to take MRT, but one trip on a cab can easily cost me up to $27 after midnight. These days I have to scrimp a little bit as I foresee myself having some financial difficulties soon.

I took NR7 from Tampines Interchange with the intention of switching to 174M at City Hall, as it goes directly to my house. I realised that NR7 passed by Nicole’s neighbourhood, so the next time I take NR7, I could take from the bus stop at her neighbourhood instead of the interchange. But alas when I reached City Hall, I couldn’t find the stop for 174M. So I took NR5 instead which goes to my neighbourhood (I stay on Jurong West St. 91, but the bus goes to St. 81), and decided to hijack the bus and force the uncle to go to my house walk home. I managed to get lost for a while before giving up and hailing a cab. Apparently I’d been walking the wrong direction all the while. All in all the trip costed me $11.

(to be continued…)

Adrian sent us this video skit called Facebook Stalker a while ago on Ping.sg. It hasn’t failed to make me laugh everytime I watch it.

stalker 2.0 (n.) A person who follows or observes (another person) persistently, especially out of obsession or derangement, utilizing Web 2.0 tools such as Friendster or Facebook.

Funny that my friends will only call/talk to/MSN/email me whenever they need any help or favour.

I suddenly feel very, very lonely.

I have this urge to go to a new country, get a new identity, start again afresh, and rebuild my life from there.

Could someone show me where the reset button for life is?

I can foresee this happening in the future between a customer and a waiter.

Sir, would you like Anything with that?
Whatever.
Oh, so you want Whatever?
Anything…
Uh, Sir, do you want Whatever or Anything?
Whatever lah, I’m fine with Anything.
???

For those who don’t know, “Anything” is the new carbonated canned drink made locally in Singapore. There’s no indication of what’s inside, so you just have to guess what’s inside. It could be cola, cola with lemon, apple, fizz up (?), cloudy lemon, or root beer. “Whatever” is the non-carbonated counterpart, and may contain ice lemon tea, peach tea, jasmine green tea, white grape tea, apple tea, or chrysanthemum tea. (According to Keropokman)

I have no idea where NTU got its passage generator for its corporate communication materials, but it sure is hilarious! With all the obsession with Batman, Santa Claus, growing up, anger, poison, marriage, and—best of all—botulism (described by The Free Dictionary as “A severe, sometimes fatal food poisoning caused by ingestion of food containing botulin and characterized by nausea, vomiting, disturbed vision, muscular weakness, and fatigue.”)

Here are some excerpts:

… although Batman quite lamely bought two subways, but Santa Claus abused sheep … then the dwarf fights umpteen dogs …

This is classic! Randomness at its best!

… one Macintosh marries Batman …

You mean Batman is married to a computer?!?

Umpteen elephants lamely perused one purple cat …

Sounds very, very wrong…

Purple trailers quite comfortably marries one schizophrenic Klingon …

No wonder the Klingon is schizophrenic.

… umpteen bureaux telephoned the sheep, even though Santa Claus grew up quickly …

Santa Claus really has to grow up more quickly.

… but the almost purple cats ran away noisily.

Must be because of the elephants.

Umpteen tickets tastes five purple fountains, however Batman grew up.

Still not as quickly as Santa Claus.

For those who have an NTU user account, you can get the source here, or in this public folder posting.

Phew, finally I’m done with my industrial attachment (IA) report… And the report has been approved by my company supervisor, so I just need to do some final editing, get the report bound, and it’s off for submitting tomorrow! Yay!

So what does the report have to do with the title of this post?

How many of you have done reports the ‘typical man’s’ way? So you fire up Microsoft Word, type out the entire report, and while doing the first section heading you thought “oh, I want this heading to be bold, in Times New Roman at 16 point.”

A hundred sections later, it suddenly came upon you that 16 point is too large. So you scrolled all the way up, and then start changing every single of the one hundred section headings to 14 point.

After typing another fifty sections, you thought Times New Roman wasn’t so nice for a heading, so you decided to change it to Arial Black. So you went back to the top, and painstakingly replace the font of each and every section heading, only to realise that your muscle memory had changed the headings to Arial instead of Arial Black.

This problem would have been eliminated had the writer had the habit of assigning styles to his report. In MS Word 2003, this can be accomplished by going to the Format menu and then clicking Styles and Formatting. The Styles and Formatting panel should appear to the right of the window.

So when you start typing your report, just keep on applying the correct styles into your document. To apply a style to a text, select the text, and then click on the style that you want to apply on the panel. Concentrate on getting the correct styles applied. For example, a section (or chapter) heading might be assigned Heading 1, a subsection might be assigned Heading 2, and so on so forth.

If you feel like changing the style of the section heading, for example, simply click on the arrow next to the style you want to change (Heading 1), and then click Modify… There’s a myriad of formatting that you can change here, from borders to line spacing to tabs.

So let’s say if one hundred sections later you feel like changing all your section headings to Arial Black at 14 point, you can go back to the Styles and Formatting panel, click on the small arrow next to Heading 1, click Modify…, make the necessary changes in the dialog box, and click OK.

Changing styles in your document. As easy as 1, 2, 3!

Voilà! All one hundred section headings would be adjusted automatically. Not only that, all the section headings would now be consistent. Gone are the days when you assign 14 point font for one section heading, and 15 point for another!

Makes your job a hundred times easier, doesn’t it?

PS: Some of you might have known that I’ve been doing some (X)HTML/CSS designing/programming for quite some time now (though I’m still yet to build a portfolio of the websites I’ve designed). I’ve never thought that the skills obtained, in particular the separation of content and presentation, would be extremely helpful when doing reports in MS Word!

My graphic card is getting pretty annoying these days. It’s an NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GS, so it’s supposed to be quite decent… Take a look at these screenshots:

I look like I got stabbed right through!

The Hurricane Tour board has funny texture.

Um, my car doesn’t really look that aerodynamic…

Suddenly some weird-looking boards appear right in front of me. Bad…

According to my investigation, the cause of the distortion is overheating of the graphic card… The funny thing is that it overheats at just over 60 degrees Celsius. And each of the screenshots were taken before I’ve played for even an hour! I think at the worst (i.e. hot days), it was down to just 5 minutes before the distortion appears. Second Life seems to be the one most affected, as the distortion can appear at as soon as 30 seconds after I started it.

Time to draft an email to complain and claim the warranty…

In a bid to break the monotony at work, today I decided to watch porn at work meet up with T for lunch. She was in Orchard as she had to go to the Nokia service centre to get her phone fixed. She also had to meet up with her relatives. The only problem was that the former was in the morning, and the latter was in the evening, so she practically had 5 hours to waste in Orchard.

After delaying the scheduled meet up time by half an hour because I wanted to start the build process first (the program build process usually takes up a lot of time, which I usually leave for lunch), we finally decided to have lunch at Cuppage Plaza. We wanted to eat the Indonesian Bakmi (noodles) there, but alas the stall had already closed.

We finally decided to eat another Indonesian food from another stall there called Kantin “Aneka” (literally “Various” Canteen). The good thing about this stall is that the food looked and tasted authentic (actually, I didn’t even realise it until T told me). We had batagor (short for bakso tahu goreng, literally fried tofu and meat), which is sort of fried tofu and meat (duh) served with peanut sauce. Too bad I didn’t take any pictures. I had extra rice as well.

For dessert we had soya bean curd. I think I really have to start learning Chinese, because it was hard to say “I just want bean curd only” when the guy at the stall didn’t even understand what a “bean curd” is. In the end, I had to say that I wanted Set A (bean curd with youtiao) but without the youtiao.

Well after that, we went our separate ways and never met again until the afterlife, I went back to my office and she went shopping.

***

My gum is starting to get annoying. I’ve been having swollen gum since last week. It’s at the corner next to my molar teeth.

I used to have this problem last year where food will get stuck to the gum at the corner there, which eventually got infected, and I had to see the dentist. He charged $40 just to clear that section and prescribe me a medication to reduce the pain and swelling. It’s not exactly a wisdom tooth problem, because the teeth are already out, just that they’re partially covered by the gum.

This time at first I thought it was because I’m too heaty, because the swelling is not as bad as last time. But then it has been going on for quite some time, so if this carries on, I think I’ll have to see the dentist again.

Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn. If you can read the small text in the Console window (or if you open the full resolution image), you’ll actually see that I was trying to install Second Life, which failed because I can’t install the correct driver in the Live CD session.

I’m typing this from Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn Live CD. I abandoned Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake after it failed to install, and reverted my then-dual-boot laptop to one which only boots to Windows.

Besides I thought that there wasn’t much more for me to see in Ubuntu.

But now that I’ve seen for myself that Ubuntu 7.04 is so much more intuitive and attractive, I might give it another try the next time I reformat my machines (yes, that’s a plural because now I have my desktop to play with too). Not to mention the pretty, built-in visual effects (wobbly windows and desktop cube) which I’m quite blown away with. No comments on the functionality side yet as I need to really try it first before giving a subjective comment.

I’ve ordered 3 free CDs (2 PC Edition, 1 64-bit PC Edition) from their ShipIt service, and am just waiting for them to arrive now.

Wow, it has been a week since I last blogged. Has it really been that long?

The week has passed by very, very quickly. After my last post, I was stressed over my Final Year Project (FYP) selection. Knowing that it is a project I am going to be stuck with for one year, I had no choice but to choose very, very wisely. Of course, people around me just kept on telling me to pick randomly (you’ll know why I was tempted to do so too). Others told me to choose the supervisor, not the project. But to me, the project is just as important, if not more, since if I’m not interested in the project in the first place, I wouldn’t even have the drive to complete the project satisfactorily.

There are two phases in which you can get to choose your FYP:

1. Pick-and-pull-by-supervisor

   This phase starts on 7 May and ends on 14 May. In this phase, students can approach the supervisor directly, and after discussion, if both parties are agreeable, the student can be allocated the project instantly.

2. Pick-random-minimized (a fancy name for “computer balloting”, really)

   This phase lasts from 15 May until 21 May. In this phase, students can choose up to 10 choices of projects. After the end of the period, the computer will allocate the projects according to the preference stated. Of course, in most cases this translates to a simple word: “random”.

Not surprisingly, I opted for the first phase.

On Monday I was busy with posting of 3 builds (2 major and 1 minor) at work, so I didn’t get a chance to choose my FYP. By the end of the day, I saw that a few of the projects had been snapped up.

There were 1021 projects to choose from. This was the reason why I was so tempted to heed by the others’ advice to just pick the project randomly. Of course the wiser of me decided not to, since I will most likely end up with some funny project with some funny professor. It will not be funny, I tell you.

I spent Tuesday shortlisting the projects I might have the slightest interest in. Here my broad interest actually came as a major disadvantage, because after shortlisting I ended up with 187 projects. I wasted the entire Wednesday going through the list again, making up my mind which projects to choose. All the while I’ve been watching the allocated projects list in horror, as more and more projects were being snapped up. By the end of Wednesday, I only had about 100 projects which I could choose from my list. The rest had been allocated to other students.

In the end, I shortlisted 3 projects which I am most interested in: “Data Mining with Evolutionary Algorithm”, “Development of a NLP [sic] Based Search Engine” and “Auto Assessment of Engineering Assignments”. All are equally interesting. The first two are from the same supervisor, who seems to be quite fun to work with. The third one is from a supervisor who I didn’t know of. It also happens to be an industry-sponsored project, and I used to work in the company that sponsors that project.

I decided to email the two supervisors to get more information. I arranged a meeting on Thursday with the first supervisor. The second one simply forwarded my email to the industry partner, who replied pretty quickly.

So I took a day leave on Thursday to weigh my choices.

I met the first supervisor and was given more information about the project. I was also told that the second project was no longer available.

So by then my choices were only left with two: “Data Mining with Evolutionary Algorithm” and “Auto Assessment of Engineering Assignments”.

The first project is something which I could visualise, so in a way I felt quite safe if I were to take the project. The second project, on the other hand, required me to learn a totally new technique, and apply it in an unexpected area. In a way, the second project will take me to my limit, and allow me to see if I can take up research. The safety-first in me wanted me to take the first one, but the adventurous side of me wanted me to take the second.

And so for hours on Thursday, I sat there in front of the library PC, continually switching my windows between one which showed the description of the first project, and another which showed the second. I was in despair, I really didn’t know which one to choose. All the while more and more projects were getting snapped up.

I decided to go home and email the supervisor and industry partner for the second project. In the email, I basically said that I have no background in that area at all, and whether it would be suitable for me. The industry partner was quick to reply that he can teach me whatever I need to know, as long as I am willing to learn.

So I thought “ah, heck” and decided to reply saying that I would take up the second project. I didn’t know what I was thinking, but I was quite calm. Perhaps I was exhausted from thinking about my FYP throughout the week.

So on Friday, my name was there on the list, right beside “Auto Assessment of Engineering Assignments”.

Somehow I feel that my final year is going to be hectic.

***

On Friday night, I went to Geek Terminal with Nicole, DK, and Veron. It wasn’t exactly a Ping.sg meet up, but just a couple of geeks chilling out. I was supposed to do my report there, but I didn’t have the mood to. Ended up eating DK’s nachos, the geek soup, and cafe mocha.

Oh, and check this out…

Cool, huh? The barista, Danny, did the names for us on the coffee. Next time you go to Geek Terminal, make sure you strike up a conversation with him. He really have a lot of stories about coffee to share!

Like everyone else said, Geek Terminal hasn’t really opened officially yet, but it has already been popular amongst bloggers, even with all the drilling noises from the restaurant downstairs. We even bumped into Kevin, Neo, Ridz and his friend Jasmine. I wonder how it’s going to be like when it’s finally open.

Also check out what others say: DK, Nicole, Ridz.

***

Oh, crap. I really have to start doing my internship report…