A Better Title

OK, so I submitted my CV (for my CS226 Desktop Publishing project) today, and here it is… Any comments?

• Curriculum Vitae
• Self-Critique

And… If you happen to really check my website while grading my CV: Hi Kay Chin!

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W00t! After a round of voting, I am now known as…

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… not the Chairperson of Designers Club!

Neither did Imam get the Vice-Chairperson position.

Maybe I was too tired or too desensitized or just too boh chup, because when I first saw the voting results after reentering the lecture theatre, I didn’t feel anything at all. No joy (over having less work to commit to), no disappointment (over not getting the position). Nothing. Zip. Nada. Just a neutral feeling as if it was just another day in my life.

Of course, after a while, I realised that I was quite happy to see the voting results–I didn’t fare too badly actually, getting about 41% of the votes, considering my efforts on doing a well-prepared speech went down the drain because I was too confident that I could speak well without looking at the piece of paper containing my speech. In fact, I didn’t prepare well at all–I was too busy doing other projects–and hence I stumbled on my own words.

I was satisfied with my own portfolio, although I didn’t show the Flash presentation I did because I didn’t want to take up too much time.

And… Some people actually left before I even gave my speech.
Add to the fact that she (the other nominee for the Chairperson position) had quite a number of friends who came down for the purpose of voting for her, whereas I only had a considerably fewer–thanks Halim, Udo, Henche, Fendi, Ken, Icha, Yongky, Acong, Kristo, and whoever I missed out who came down to support me.

So yeah, I was quite happy already.

Anyway… The main reason why I had tried to be the chairperson was because I wanted the experience. Of course, other reasons exist: I like designing anyway and wanted to give back to the club and because the other vice-chairperson candidate was chio. Who said that one can’t get experience and give back to the club and meet the vice-chairperson by becoming a subcommittee member?

It’s probably partly divine intervention too–I have this feeling that I’m starting to overdrive myself. Not getting the position means that I would be committing to less stuff.

Anyway… I like the word ‘anyway’…

Anyway… I’m pretty sure that the new chairperson and vice-chairperson of Designers Club can run the club well. I saw their portfolio and they were not bad… I myself will still join the club as a sub-committee member. Let’s see how things go from then on!
Oh yeah, I didn’t want to say this actually, but Imam insisted on me doing so, so this is to let everyone know that Imam stole the words in my curriculum vitae, and used it for his own presentation. He also copied my speech.

And… He would also like to join me and once again thank those who came down and supported us. Thank you all.

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I think that, to most people, I’m just one of those computer technical support officers who won’t turn down a cry for help.

But other than that, I’m just one unimportant being that takes up a space as a human on earth.

And I’m not even paid! Not like those people who actually become technical support officers for a living.

Yes, I love to share my knowledge and I can’t turn down a cry for help and all, but ultimately, I’m still a human being.

I want someone who can see and treasure me as a friend.

No need to be a girlfriend (or boyfriend for that matter), but just as a true, real friend.

Someone who will actually be there when I need one.

Someone who can accept me as I am, with all my quirks and twists.

Someone I can share my interests with.

I mean, seriously, I’m looking forward to seeing that day when people will ask me how I am doing in life with a genuine intention on catching up, not just as a preface to ask why his internet connection doesn’t work. Sometimes it hurts when the latter comes; if my heart were to have tear glands, it would have flooded my tummy.

Will that day ever come?

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Heard during EE2006 Engineering Mathematics 1 lecture:

“You all have learnt AC sir cute, DC sir cute, right?” [circuit]

“… so as the limit goes to infinity, some of you will do infinity to the power of 3 divided by infinity to the power of 3. Then you get one. I call this perverted logic.”

“Hello? Somebody keeps on talking there. You see, it’s periodic, low-frequency signal. And the period is 15 minutes, you keep on talking every 15 minutes.”

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Korean Creativity Flickr Set: A guy took photos of ordinary life, drew on them, and turned them into cute comic-strip-like works of art.

[via lancerlord]

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Yay! So happy! Finally managed to setup wireless network connection on Ubuntu!

Check out WiFiHowto to find out how. If your wireless card is not natively supported by Ubuntu (like my SMC 2635W) you may be able to use the card’s Windows driver by utilising Ndiswrapper, which sort of ‘wraps’ the Windows driver such that it is usable within Ubuntu. Check out SetupNdiswrapperHowto to do this.

Time to go back to projects yet again.

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Hello!

I’m back just for a while to ask for your comments on my Curriculum Vitae (résumé) for my CS226 Desktop Publishing project…

Here it is… (updated!)

You’ll need Adobe Reader to open it.

Do leave your comments by Wednesday afternoon because the project is due then. Thanks!

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back to hibernation.

I broke my own promise to stop blogging after 20 hours. But this is too good to be missed.

XIV has an entry dedicated to Indonesia for her 60th birthday. Sniff.

Excerpt:

See? I understand you real well. We all do. We want to return you to your glorious old self; The one who, when her name was mentioned, would make us stick our chests out with pride, instead of making us grin sheepishly and wish we weren’t there. (Like the last few months: Indonesia scored two golds in International Physics Olympiad (Pride!) both contestants will continue their studies at NTU (Gush!) Malaysia slams Indonesian government over haze (CRASH!) )

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Went for a focus group discussion to help my friend in his CS341 Audience Research project. I’m not taking the module as it’s not part of the requisite for the minor.

The topic discussed: blogging.

After 3 years of blogging, I’ve to say that I’ve never really discussed about blogging to any of my friends–let alone in an actual discussion group. Yes, we usually talk about the topics we write in our blogs, but we never really talked about blogging itself.

The reason is partly that not many of my closest friends blog. Another reason is that I’m not good in vocalising my opinions. Most of the time I have problems arranging my thoughts, making it look as if I don’t know what I’m talking about and say something for the sake of saying it. I mean, just read my blog and you’ll know what I mean whenever I try to speak out my opinion. In writing it’s not so bad because I can revise and rewrite or rearrange my points, but unfortunately they’re impossible verbally.

So what happened was that the eight of us (six participants and two moderators) interacted in this conference-room-like er… room aptly called “Focus Group Room”.

And… Whatever we were saying and even our own gestures were recorded. Everything. Someone who just entered the room might not notice the four microphones on the tables and four video cameras located strategically in the corners of the room as well as the ceiling, all linked to the adjoining room which resembles a security centre, complete with all the surveillance equipments such as video and sound recorders. The two rooms are linked visually too by a layer of one-way mirror.

The topics talked about include things like what we think about the different types of blogs (personal ones such as Xiaxue, news-like (forgot what the term used was) such as mr brown, and topical such as Days Were The Those), why we blog, what we want to see when we read blogs, or even whether we do blogwalking (read unknown people’s blogs).

Then we went on to talk about how some people can be quite different in the blog and in real life… Something like a friend of one of the participants who seems to be quite happy-go-lucky in real life but sounds so depressed in the blog.

We also touched a little bit on the new technologies such as audioblogging and videoblogging, which I personally think is quite a waste of time–both to the blogger and the listener. To the blogger, producing an audioblog will definitely take up more time than typing, and the listener must follow the speed of the blogger and won’t be able to read at his own pace.

I forgot to mention the emergence of moblog–that is mobile blogging, where a blogger can upload pictures and text directly to his blog via an MMS-enabled cameraphone. This way, an event can be reported ‘live’ from the location, much like mr brown has been doing lately. I myself tried this feature with this test post and Ale’s photo. Unfortunately, I don’t have a cameraphone, so I can’t really make use of this technology. Ale’s photo was taken by himself long time ago, and was uploaded using his phone.

Oh, and one of the participants actually know Xiaxue personally…

I should have asked Bubblemunche (a.k.a. Hisreason) to come along to the discussion–it would be quite interesting to hear from him.

Anyway… It seems like work starts to pile up…

I got the position as Special Projects (Internal) Manager for ACM SIGGRAPH NTU Student Chapter, and am rallying for Designers Club Chairperson for Visual Arts Society next week. I’ll have to do a speech and show some of my portfolio to garner votes for myself. If you can come on Thursday, 25 August 2005, 7.30 p.m. at LT 22, please do and give me your support. If you do come, don’t forget to vote for Imam as the Vice Chairperson. Thanks!

Academic-wise, I’ve got quizzes coming up in Week 6, that’s two weeks from now. I also have a Curriculum Vitae due next week for CS226 Desktop Publishing, and a formal laboratory report due two weeks from now for EE2071 Laboratory 2a.

Not to be forgotten is a proposal for a research or experimental project for EE2009 Technical Communication. This one is group work, so the responsibility is split up among the five members of the group.

And… Stuff from the first three weeks, some of which I’ve been happily neglecting.

Die lah…

I think I should stop blogging for a while. If you don’t see me updating this space for the next few weeks or so, you know why… I’ll be back when I really have something very interesting to say, or when all my work is done.

See you all soon.

Oh, almost forgot:

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This post is very long and really should be divided into these three sections:

1. Long-Lost Friend #1
2. Pink London Cab
3. Long-Lost Friend #2

My almost-one-week absence from the blogosphere (the Ale photo not counted as a post) can be attributed to the fact that university lessons have resumed to normalcy since the National Day.

Besides, the dry cough I’ve been having since 6 August has not been any better despite the fact that I skipped Technical Communication lesson on 10 August to see the doctor. The cough requires me to sleep earlier than usual, and thus deprives me of any spare time to actually write something.

As such, most details on Technoquest, of which I am an IT sub-committee member, and PON 6 which I attended just for a while due to Technoquest, had to be left out.

Actually come to think of it, I have the option of just writing a little bit about the two events, which I shall do now.

Technoquest is an annual IT competition in which teams from various secondary schools, JCs and universities compete in various stages, such as an IT quiz, a programming competition, and finally, er, the final quiz. I was one of those in charge of technical support during the programming competition, and as such was responsible for any technical glitches. Of course, given that out of the two development programs used (NetBeans and Dev-Cpp), I only have a knowledge on Dev-Cpp, I could only help half of the technical questions raised throughout the competition.

PON 6 is the sixth Pekan Olahraga NTU, something like the Sports Week for the Indonesian students in NTU. I didn’t participate in any of the events as I was busy doing technical support in Technoquest, but apparently my team, Pala Wedhus (short of emPAt, LimA, jurong WEst, DHUa, empat belaS, corresponding to Hall 4, Hall 5, Jurong West, Hall 2, and Hall 14 respectively) became the porn star PON star, clinching the most golds and the highest total weighted points in events comprising of badminton, soccer, basketball, galasin (a traditional Indonesian game), table tennis, volley ball, chess, capsa, congklak, bakiak race, happy relay run, tug-of-war, Winning Eleven, and pool.

Now, if I were to continue talking about Technoquest and PON 6, the title of this post won’t be relevant anymore, right?

So let’s talk about today.

Today is a very, very funny and unusual day. It must have been one of the few days in my life in which I experienced for myself sheer temptation to give up, followed a glint of hope provided by a friend casually over lunch, which turned out to be the key that allowed me to finally achieve what I had wanted to, all just within a couple of hours.

There’s this friend of mine. We were in the same class for 4 months in high school back in Indonesia.

But fate brought me to Singapore after 4 months in the school.

And from then on I had lost contact with this person.

Five years later, a friend request in Friendster reminded me of the person.

YuNiTa would like to add you as a friend. Approve/Reject?

She looked so beautiful in her wedding gown that fine Saturday afternoon. I could barely hear the priest saying the wedding affirmation that would tie both of us with the sacred and holy bond of marriage till eternity.

“Will you have this woman to be your wife and will you, before God and these witnesses, solemnly affirm and declare your marital intentions and expectations to her, in all honor and love, in all service and duty, in all faith and tenderness, to live with her, to comfort, keep her, and cherish her, according to the ordinance of God, in the holy bond of marriage?”.

I looked at her deeply in the eyes and said, “Approve.”

‘Approve’ was my answer.

And from then on, we’ve been chatting quite often on MSN. I found out that after finishing high school in Indonesia, she went to the land of Neanderthals Netherlands for her tertiary education. I found out too that due to language reason, the start of her university time was delayed for two years, making her in the same level as I am.

And I found out too that she was coming to Singapore one day for vacation, and as such had planned to meet when she was here. But that was all I knew; there were no details at all.

Days passed since her last MSN message.

When finally the next message came yesterday, it was not a joyous one.

In short, apparently she was already in Singapore and had tried to contact me multiple times but had been unsuccessful. M1 doesn’t seem to have an agreement for SMS traffic with her provider back in the Netherlands (she was roaming in Singapore) and as such none of our messages reached the other.

The problem was that she was leaving the following day (i.e. today) in the afternoon.

Knowing that we probably will not see each other anymore within the next few years, we quickly arranged to meet today in the morning somewhere in Singapore (thereby requiring me to skip lessons). The plan was that she would message me in the morning to confirm the exact time and place to meet once she had decided where she was heading.

All was well, and this morning I skipped lessons.

But the promised message never arrived. All my means to contact her were unsuccessful. Calls to her mobile number were always replied with a recorded message in Dutch, and my SMS message was not replied. Not even the one sent from my friend’s mobile phone, which uses StarHub. I remembered that she mentioned in the MSN chat that she didn’t have any more credits in her phone, but I didn’t want to give up so easily. Maybe somehow she could call through another phone.

When an hour later there was still no reply, I had decided to stop trying.

So I went to lunch with the kind friend who lent me his mobile phone. When he suggested me to call a mutual friend, suddenly somewhere in my head, brain cells responsible for long-term memory tingled. She had mentioned her friend’s mobile phone in the MSN chat!

Trying my luck, I quickly finished my lunch, and took a taxi back home. Upon reaching, I digged my chat log for the number, and lo-and-behold, it was there!

I swiftly typed a message and sent it to the number in the chat log. It was a kind of awkward because I didn’t even know personally who this friend of hers was!

My efforts paid off. The person told me to call another number where this friend of mine could be reached.

I did, and lo-and-behold… a guy picked up.

I hung up on him, threw the phone on my table and cried for the next hour or so.

I didn’t know what to say but “Uh… Dengan Yunita?” (“Uh… With Yunita?”) when it was obvious it wasn’t her.

“Sebentar yah.” (“Hold on a second.”)

“Halo?” (“Hello?”)

For a while I was taken aback. Somehow her voice didn’t register. It had been almost 6 years since I last heard it after all. It was only a while later that I could utter my first word.

“Yun?”

And so it was decided that we would meet at IMM Building at Jurong East.

I didn’t have much time as I had a laboratory session at 1.30 p.m., which I couldn’t skip at all.

So I quickly dashed out of the flat, crossed the road, and got hit by a taxi flagged a taxi, and went to IMM Building.

Even then, finding her turned to be a quest as I had never been to IMM before.

To make a short story long To cut a long story short, we finally met up and had a short chat. The guy who picked up the phone turned out to be Felix, a friend of hers who became her tour guide while she was in Singapore.

She mentioned she wanted to see my ex-crush who I told her about, something which would be impossible since she is not around in Singapore at the moment.

My quest was finally completed.

We only managed to chat for half-an-hour before I had to go back. I planned to take a taxi straight to the lab.

So… there was this Pink London Cab in the second place in the taxi queue. At first I was making fun of the pink taxi with Yunita and Felix when I was chatting with them. Anyway, in front of it was a Comfort cab, which I was quite sure I would get as the passenger queue was empty.

As luck would have it, I was walking to the taxi stand when the Comfort taxi happily drove off.

Freak.

And so, I went back to NTU in a Pink London Cab!

Once inside, I told the driver my destination and quickly took photos of this cab. Heck, it’s not everyday that I got this kind of cab!

The interior of the cab. The driver’s cabin is separated from the passengers’ by a sound-proof glass. Virtually everything inside is pink. See the hearts?

There’s ample seating space in the cab, especially for just one passenger! I could even extend my feet fully.

The side of the taxi said that the passengers area can accommodate 5 passengers. The two extra passengers can sit on these foldable seats.

It says London Taxi. The picture is blurred as the patch is quite small and was hard to focus on.

The driver can hear you. But you can switch off his hearing aid if you so choose. Just make sure you don’t accidentally switch it off when you’re actually trying to tell him that he’s going the wrong way. There are also extra security measures to ensure the safety of the passengers.

This cab was made in Coventry with pride.

Even the driver wore a pink cap. Can you see it?

After a while though, the novelty of being in a pink London cab wore off and turned into a concern: How was I going to alight without being noticed?

I mean, how many London cabs ever entered NTU, let alone a pink one? Heck, I’ve been in Singapore for 6 years, and it was the first time I saw one! My arrival would surely make at least a couple of heads turn… The plan to go straight to the lab had to be scrapped.

After much thinking, I’ve decided that Nanyang Terrace, where the staff housing is located would be a good choice as it doesn’t have much human traffic.

So up the taxi went the Nanyang Terrace, and I alighted just near the staircase that leads to the North Spine.

I paid the fare, got out, and took a final photo of the cab.

So that’s the pink London cab at Nanyang Terrace. Can you see the driver giving the thumbs-up sign?

And so after the journey, I went for lab. The lab was a very fun one, where we had to prove Fourier transform using this software called Matlab. The bad news is, I had to do a formal report on it. The good news is, the lab was quite easy, and it was one of the few labs where I actually understood what is going on.

After lab, I skipped the following lessons to meet yet another friend.

This time, it’s a guy. I first met Steven during the International Friendship Day back when I was in JC1. It was only towards the end of our JC years that we realised that we had quite a lot of similarities, and became quite close friends.

As luck would have it, he left for the USA for the University of Michigan to further his studies. Like Yunita, he also had to leave quite soon: tomorrow.

So I thought: it’s now or never. It could be years before we can meet again.

However unlike Yunita, the meeting with him was a straightforward one.

I went straight to Clementi, where we were to meet. Unfortunately, along the way he messaged me saying that he was still at Orchard, and would come soon.

I didn’t really mind. I had the Clementi Book Store to go to in any case.

Just a short ten minutes in the book store, and I was already in love with some Adobe InDesign books I was reading. I might need to buy one to give me ideas for my CS226 Desktop Publishing projects. I was contemplating on buying one when finally Steven called. That was lucky of me, because otherwise I might have parted with at least 30 dollars of my money. I later thought that I might as well borrow the book from a library instead.

We met and ate our favourite fried prawn noodles in one of the many hawker centres of Clementi. Along the way, we updated each other on what we were up to and basically just talked cock. His hair now looked like one of an army recruit’s, because he cut it himself. He said it was because the cost of a haircut in the USA is around USD 17, more than four times the SGD 8 haircut in Dover Market! The solution to this was simple: He bought a electric hair-cutter in Indonesia for IDR 300,000, approximately USD 37.50. It’s much cheaper this way.

Later on we hunted for *coughcopiedcough* softwares that are rumoured to exist in Clementi, but couldn’t find one. We also went to another book store so he could get some pens for him to bring back to the USA. He told me that it’s very expensive to buy the pens in the USA. One that costs SGD 1.40 in Singapore can cost him USD 2 in the USA.

But time passed, and it was time to go home.

We didn’t take a photo as we thought it would be funny to see two guys taking a picture of themselves together in the midst of the afternoon Clementi crowd, so I hope the readers will be content with this photo taken back in March 2004. Just imagine that only the two left-most people are present, and that the background is the Clementi crowd.

We said our final words, waved our goodbyes, and parted.

And so, it was a day well-spent, in my opinion.
Now, time to catch up on my studies yet again…

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