A Better Title

Who wants?

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PS: W00t! 27 entries in a month! A record high for this one year!

As it turned out, the second day of the Flash Course by Visual Arts Society was much much much much much much much much much much much better than the first day by an enormous degree.

Of course, the reason why it was so, was because HM took over both Basic and Advanced course. She learnt Flash professionally (as in, she actually had lessons on Flash in the Polytechnic she was from) so she explained things much much better than I could. In fact, if she were to be the one teaching yesterday, it would have made the society’s image much much much better.

(And by the way, she was also the one who prepared the course documents, so she would have known what to teach. I only had one night to read through the course document, so I didn’t manage to prepare much).

Another reason why the lessons I conducted was probably pretty hard to understand was because I’m more used to doing things by hands-on, as compared to actually explaining what is going on. That’s why I had preferred for the lesson to be conducted with a projector. I also prefer to teach a person on a one-on-one basis.

It’s like, I know how to do things, but I don’t know how to explain them.

But again, in the end we’ve got our share of the benefits of the course. The students learned something, and both HM and I (and also E and J who were also there as instructors) had our fair bit of experience. The society also got really good reviews on the course…

(One review went like: “Oh, it’s much better than the one conducted by [club name censored]. It’s like, the instructor knows what he’s doing, but he can’t explain. In the end, I couldn’t finish the course.” Sounds like me the previous day… :P)

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What’s with guys in pink today? How come I see lots of them in the library today?

My hand smell of coffee. Must be more careful the next time I buy coffee from the drinks stall.

I would like to assure all the Chinese (be it Singaporeans, Malaysians, or mainland China) who read my blog that the fact that I don’t understand Chinese is not due to my studying in ACS (I) and ACJC, but because the Chinese language is not as much spoken in my Chinese Indonesian family as in a Chinese Singaporean family.

Therefore, please bear with me when you start talking to me in Chinese and I interrupt halfway saying “Sorry, I don’t understand Chinese”.

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Something to give you that ‘what the hell’ of the day: Badger Badger Badger.

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I thought I would fall sick yesterday, but in the end I don’t even though I slept at 3 AM last night–thanks to Redoxon Double Action Vitamin C + Zinc and lots of water intake.

You stay up until 3 AM when you felt you were falling sick?

Oh yes. I was trying to formulate a lesson plan for the Macromedia Flash course I was conducting today.

Oh yes, out of pretty cool circumstances, I was chosen to become the instructor for the Flash course today.

Not that I was really good at it though.

I love teaching. I really do.

But what I actually prefer is tutoring a person one-on-one, something like showing a person how to actually do those fancy tricks in Flash.

What I was expected to do was actually get in front there and show a group of people how to do things in Flash.

This was a little bit of a problem, because I’ve never conducted such a lesson before, and although I spent the last few hours of the previous night to prepare for the lesson, I was still not sure whether the way I explained was easy to understand. True, throughout the Basic course I was pretty nervous and went through the things too slowly. Add this to the fact that I’m used to Macromedia Flash MX while the application taught was Macromedia Studio MX 2004, which is a tad bit different from the first.

I ended up panicking, causing J, the Visual Arts Society’s chairman, to actually continue the course.

I took a little break and by the time I came back, J had already started with the Advanced course.

This time, I was more confident, because in this course I was only expected to teach some tricks to do with Flash, instead of actually going through the tools.

Still, I didn’t really prepare this, and certain fundamental mistakes crept in. (Sometimes it’s a little difficult to explain the tricks when you’re so used to them such that you actually don’t really think too much about the process of doing it). I had to apologise quite a bit to the students throughout the course.

(Actually, it would help much if we actually had a projector in the room so that I can show them how to do things. I had to actually rely on drawing on the board to explain!).

But at the end of the day, I guess it was good for everyone. The society obtained quite a few of good reviews. The students learnt quite a lot, and I myself obtained quite a fair amount of experience.

Tomorrow the Basic lesson will be conducted by HM, a sub-committee member from Comics Ensemble, while I’ll take over Advanced course together with J (this is another J), the Designers Club chairperson. Both Designers Club and Comics Ensemble are sub-clubs of Visual Arts Society, by the way.

So… Wish us luck! Hope that HM, J, and myself won’t be nervous, and that tomorrow’s course will be an even more successful one!

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I just came back from Creative Customer Care Centre to ask about the fees that I have to pay if I were to get a replacement for the scroller button of my Nomad Jukebox 3.

I promised myself that I would go for it if the fees were lower than SGD 30.

I happily came home afterwards with nothing, as the fees turned out to be SGD 133.20 excluding GST.

At that amount, I might as well get an iPod shuffle or Creative Muvo-series or some sub-$200 [insert cute China/Taiwan/Korea brand here] Flash Drive MP3 player instead.

Or does anyone want to buy me one? Valentine’s Day coming you know… Nothing can make a geek’s life happier than a new toy to play with.
By the way, I overheard another customer’s complaint while waiting for my turn at the Customer Care Centre.

Apparently he somehow caused his MP3 player’s hard drive to crash. He then came to the Customer Care Centre, insisting on them to recover ‘whatever songs [he] put inside’. He ‘[doesn’t] care how they do it because that’s what an after-sales service, especially one under warranty, should be like’ even though one of the customer service centre had already told him that the songs in the player are not included in the terms of the warranty.

The customer apparently didn’t care. He was even stupid enough not to have a backup copy of the songs he had inside the MP3 player. He probably never knew that there’s very little chance of recovering data from a crashed hard drive. Even if it’s a normal desktop hard drive, data recovery would probably cost him hundreds of dollars.

This is no ordinary hard drive we have here. It’s a smaller hard drive suited for those mini MP3 players.

The customer service officer appeared shaken and looked as if she was on the verge of tears.

Customers can be really stupid at times…

I liked the sky yesterday night and today. It was cloudless. Last night was so beautiful with the stars [insert poetic phrase here] and today the cerulean sky [insert another poetic phrase here]…

Too bad that the weather in general did not do justice to the beauty of the sky. It has been very windy–no, gusty actually. Add this to fluctuating temperatures and rain, and you get a weather just perfect for falling sick.

In fact, as I’m typing now, I’m feeling a little unwell, with that feeling in your throat that you get just before you actually catch a flu.

It’s time to start consuming those Vitamin C tablets.

(Well, actually, probably what I need more is breaking out of the habit of sleeping only after 3 AM).

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It seems that Gmail is kind enough to give me three extra invitations. That leaves me with 4 (four) invitations to give out. Two invitations left. If you want any, please leave a comment or drop me a message.

I just went through the contents for the coming issue of Spectra (which will be released on Valentine’s Day). I’m really delighted to see MUCH improvements compared to how Spectra was when I was still a student in ACJC. Specifically, I’m really glad there’s now less dependance on the use of terrains usually associated with Spectra and Bryce.

Some of them are really, really good, in fact, very much above my own expectation. Well done, Spectrans!

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Today I wanted to study and do tutorials. In fact, I did a tutorial–only after 3 AM. The rest of the day was spent surfing Amazon.com’s website building my never-complete wishlist.

This wishlist has nothing to do with my birthday, which is still a long way off anyway. Most of the time I end up buying those in my wishlist (published or otherwise) myself. (Although I’d be more than happy to receive any of the items in the wishlist as a birthday gift or any other special-occasion gift. Chinese New Year coming you know… :D).

Next semester I’d be moving out of the hostel due to lack of ECA points. To where, I don’t know yet. But it’s definitely an HDB flat. It should be within the Jurong West area or, at the furthest, Bukit Batok. Hopefully if in Year 2 I can get enough points I’ll be moving back into the hostel from Year 3 onwards. Specifically, I want to move back to Hall 5.

I’m considering buying a new domain name and transferring my blog there. The reason is that noone is actually using ninerz.com. Ok, I think it’s good to learn a little bit of history here…

You see, originally I bought ninerz.com as a means to communicate for my batch of Indonesian scholars, called The Niners. eCircles and Community Zero, the online communities we had been using earlier, had started charging and none of us were willing to spend so much on these communities.

Thinking that it was probably a good idea to actually have a stable, free communication environment without ending up getting charged for the umpteenth time, I bought (sponsored according to my roommate) ninerz.com and built a simple online community from scratch.

It turned out that my programming skills at that time were not up to my own expectation and the community encountered numerous glitches, thus forcing me to shut it down before finally turning to the phpBB forum as the means of communication for the batch.

Meanwhile, I moved my blog over from Blogspot to a subdomain in ninerz.com to make use of the extra resources that the server had. The blog grew bigger and I sporadically added extra features like a photo gallery, which were usually taken down after a while either due to server errors or because I grew bored of the feature.

Months passed and until now, 2 years and almost 2 months since ninerz.com was bought, the total number of messages that were posted in the forum never exceeded 30, and out of these, almost 10 were spam by Russian brides looking for partners, Russian lesbians selling porn, Russian person trying to send flowers to a rural area, and Russian florists advertising their services. (The fact that all the spammers were Russians still baffles me).

After a while, I realised the only updated thing on the entire server, aside from my brother’s website which I host on the server as well, is actually the blog. It became the only prominent thing on the entire server.

So, today (well, yesterday actually) I decided that’s it. I thought that the time and resources I’ve spent on the forum at ninerz.com was unjustified. (Hey, ninerz.com isn’t free, you know. And those complaints to the customer service also took up quite a bit of my time). The forum was heavily underutilised and it would be ages until I have the time to create a new website for The Niners, so I thought I might as well shut the forum down and use the entire server for my blog.

So I deleted the forum, and redirected the main website (http://www.ninerz.com/) to my own blog which is currently still located here at http://hendri.ninerz.com/diary/. Go ahead and try it! Type ‘http://www.ninerz.com/’ in the address bar and you’ll get back to this page.

But that’s not cool enough. Since now there’s no more necessity for me to use the name ‘Ninerz’, I might as well buy a new domain name and use it. http://www.highbyte.com/ and http://www.haemoglobin.net/ came into my mind but alas, they’re taken.

And that’s the problem: I can’t think of a cool name which has not been taken up. If you can think of a cool name, which the narcissist me wants to hopefully resemble my name, please let me know. Edit: Actually, it doesn’t have to resemble my name. Just something that is nice and unique will do. Hopefully it can be used as the name of the blog as well, this name has become pretty cheesy after a while…

Oh, by the way, this is not a post to say that I hate The Niners. Not at all! You guys have been great friends! I especially miss those days when we were in the RELC! You guys were probably the reason why I didn’t quit during those two months.

It’s just that I thought that this effort of mine to at least give some sort of service to this special group of people has been much underutilised.

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PS: To think of the bright side, I would not have known as much of web programming and web design as I do now if not because of ninerz.com… If there was no ninerz.com as my playground, I would probably end up as a sloppy nested-tables HTML coder rather than the current XHTML/CSS addict with enough PHP/MySQL/Perl knowledge to survive. (Oops. Pardon the technical jargon). Thanks for, uh… ‘motivating’ me, albeit indirectly…

Here’s some gadgets that the geek (i.e. yours truly) has just added to his wishlist:

1. Ultra GT Cordless Optical Mouse - A gyroscopic mouse which allows you to control the mouse pointer in the air–no need for tables anymore!
2. Force Dynamics 301 - A personal motion simulator.

My birthday coming you know… *hint*

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I spent my Hari Raya Haji holiday spending for doodads.

Oh, by the way, Happy Belated Hari Raya Haji for the hajis who happen to read my blog.
Anyway… The first doodad was, well, the introduction to what doodad actually means. It was a Cashflow 101 competition held at Ang Mo Kio. Cashflow 101 is a board game not unlike Monopoly, but with a lot more rules and restrictions.

In this game, which tries to simulate real life, you’re a person trying to escape from the Rat Race, which is an illustration of how a poor man lives–working all his life for employers, buying things without thinking about the liabilities that these items brought in to his balance sheet. He basically work for his money.

The rich man, in contrast, makes his money work for him. Wait a minute… How does his money work for him? Simple. By buying assets which generate an income (via rent or otherwise) to the owner, one will receive what is called passive income. When this passive income exceeds the owner’s expenses, he doesn’t even have to work anymore and he will still have a positive net cash flow.

The things I’m saying right now is actually published in the book called Rich Dad, Poor Dad, which is where this game is based on. I myself haven’t read the book yet, but it sounds rather interesting.

So what actually is a doodad? It’s basically just something that you spend some money on, and doesn’t contribute to any financial gain. It’s like those things that you buy on impulse. You know, those times when you were walking around in a shopping mall, entered the music shop, and then picked up a Charlotte Church or Budak Pantai or John Mayer or Avril Lavigne or S.H.E. album just because it was playing on the shop’s audio system and you thought the song being played was nice.

So why is this competition where I learnt about doodad a doodad? It’s because it’s also one of those impulse thing. I was told of this competition by Herry (there you go again; a link just for you, Her! :P). The thing that attracted me was (what else) the prize. SGD 100 is not a small amount for a student like me, and thinking of the doodads I could buy with the money, I thought I might as well try my luck.

Only one problem: I didn’t know the game at all. Neither have I read the book. I knew that there was going to be a video presentation on how to play the game before the competition actually started, but I was still at a disadvantage. Fortunately, neither Herry nor Eddy, who also went with us, knew the game, so I was not the only one at this disadvantage.

It turned out that quite a few of the other participants of the competition also didn’t know a single thing about the game.

Most of them picked up pretty quickly.

Unfortunately, yours truly had some troubles picking up the game, and so by the end of the day he was the only one left on the table to play against… himself. Yes, for the last five minutes or so I was playing all by myself, rolling dice, getting paychecks and using up opportunities to get myself out of the rat race.

I still failed to get out of the rat race at the end of the competition.

But my table was apparently the one with the most people coming out of the rat race, so we won the mystery prize of–drumrolls please–a free entry to another game of Cashflow!

Sigh…

What I didn’t understand about the game though was that there was a constant need of yelling. Like when the game started, everyone like cheering. We even had table cheers in the competition!

Then when it was time for you to move your piece, everyone will start counting “ONE! TWO! THREE! FOUR!” with each step. (The quote was purposely written in uppercase to illustrate the intensity of the voices). This is followed by an enthusiastic “OPPORTUNITY!” or “MARKET!” or “YOU’VE GOT A BABY! CONGRATULATIONS!”. The latter precedes a session of shaking hands between the ‘lucky’ (or rather ‘unlucky’) player and the other players as well as the table leaders.

These and the fast pace of the game due to the fact that there was a time limit didn’t do well to the newbie’s confidence and concentration. Many times I took really super long just to try to concentrate and decide whether to sell that “OK4U” stock or whether I should kill my baby buy that 3 bedroom/2 bathroom house.

At least I learnt something–how the rich man and the poor man think–in that competition so the doodad wasn’t really totally wasted.

Another doodad I paid for today was a 572-page Rod Machado’s Private Pilot Handbook, a book which has been in my wishlist for quite some time. Woohoo!

But the price was a rip-off though. It was sold at SGD 69.01 while the original price is USD 34.95 (~ SGD 55.92). Amazon.com is selling it at a reduced price of USD 22.02 (~ SGD 35.23) excluding shipping.

But I was happy to get this book. There are still things I need to learn about aviation.

So when you’re happy it’s alright… Right?

Sigh… But it’s still a doodad leh… No good. Gotta start saving. Gotta start fasting for the next two weeks or so. Or take up part time jobs maybe… to cover up the purchase.
Right… Then afterwards I bought another doodad in the form of Breadtalk’s Golden Rooster, and Bah Kwa Delight, thinking I would eat the latter for supper and the first for tomorrow’s breakfast.

I also bought Pepsi Fire and Pepsi Ice which were on promotion in 7-Eleven–you can actually buy the two bottles for the price of SGD 1.30. Not bad… I bought these at the chain’s branch at Jurong Point on our way home.

Then went home, and visited Indo Supper–another Indonesian undergrads gathering to raise funds for Indo Prom and choose the committee for next semester’s PON (Pekan Olahraga NTU or NTU Sports Week–for Indonesian students, of course) and GTD (Get Together Day–an Indonesian orientation for NTU students).

It didn’t take me long to get bored, and so I went home after about ten minutes.

So that concludes my day of doodads…

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Note to self: Buy a bigger dust bin.

Song: Bob Ricci - Constipated