A Better Title

In the perfect world, this is what is supposed to happen last night up to the two-paper combo I have this evening and tomorrow morning.

Monday, 21 April 2008

• 6 pm: Wake up
• 10 pm: Reach school
• 10 pm-5am: Go through character list for Chinese paper

Tuesday, 22 April 2008

• 6 am: Go home
• 6 am-12 pm: Sleep
• 12-4 pm: Go through book one more time
• 5-7.30 pm: Chinese paper
• 9 pm-3 am: Sleep

Wednesday, 23 April 2008

• 3-8 am: Revise Embedded Systems one more time
• 9-11 am: Embedded Systems paper

Of course, nothing is perfect. I finished going through the characters list by 6 am, but by then it was raining heavily and I didn’t bring an umbrella along. So I stayed in school, had breakfast, and by the time I reached home it was already 8.30 am.

I set my alarm clock to 12.30 pm, half an hour later than planned. Then from 9-10.30 am, I just lay awake on my bed, tossing and turning, trying to sleep but couldn’t. At 10.30 am, I decided to postpone my waking up time to 1 pm instead.

From 10.30-11.30 am, I still tossed and turned. For some reason I was really sensitive to external interference. Like when I put on my blanket, I felt warm, but when I took it off, I felt cold. When I raised the air-con temperature by one degree, I felt warm again, and so on so forth.

Even the slightest sound of my flatmate hanging his clothes in the bathroom (the sound is caused by the metal hanger hitting the wall which is adjacent to my room) put me in an alert state again.

Finally at about 11.40 am, I was just about to fall asleep.

Just about.

Then my handphone rang.

!#$&@&!&.

And from my experience, once I’m awakened when I’m just about to fall asleep, I won’t be able to fall asleep so easily afterwards.

I might as well don’t sleep now. Besides, my experience with the English language has been that my linguistic abilities performing better when I don’t have enough sleep. For some reason, the creative side of me is able to string together more complicated and intricate sentences better when I don’t sleep enough. I hope it’s the same with Chinese.

Now the only problem is that if I were to do that, I would be awake for more than 24 hours by the time Chinese paper ends. That will leave me in a severe shortage of sleep, and I doubt the 6 hour sleep I catered to give enough time for the last-minute Embedded Systems revision is enough.

Well, I guess I’ll just have to wait and see.

The good thing is that I can sleep all I want after the Embedded Systems paper, since my last paper will be on 29 April.

Meanwhile, I’m off to mug Chinese again.

I’ve just had a long talk with my supervisor. Basically, other than the relatively good news on my FYP (which I’m not comfortable with sharing), he also offered me an opportunity to do a PhD with his team.

On one hand, I have an option of taking scholarship, even be paid to take PhD, so financially it’s not so much of a problem. On top of that, PhD is like a gateway to higher paying jobs, those which utilize as much of whatever brain cells left in my head before they die. PhD is also one of the options that I’ve considered, albeit admittedly one of the last.

On the other hand, I’m currently feeling a bit sick of studying, so adding another 3 years seems to be quite a torture. And, knowing what happened during my FYP, there’s no guarantee that I can complete PhD studies satisfactorily. And… the biggest issue here is that I think it will be a waste of my 3 years if I don’t end up staying in academia, either as a lecturer or researcher. It also brings up the issue of overqualification, where my certificate may be too advanced for the type of job that I really want to do.

I have until next Friday to decide… Any inputs, anyone?

Ah, it’s 9 hours to my meeting with my FYP supervisor and I can only hope that he doesn’t screw me up down left right square square L1 R1.

Next week I’ll be having 2 project assignments due, Chinese quiz and oral test, and the following week is the start of exams. *stressed*

Let’s see if my Chinese is up to expectation…

你好！我姓温，叫温振昌。我是印尼华人。我会说印尼话，英文，马来话和一点儿中文。我今年二十三岁了。我住在裕廊西，新加坡。我的专业是电气电子工程。我念四年级。我将来想当工程师。我的电话号码是九九九。

我家有五个人:爸爸，妈妈，哥哥，妹妹和我。爸爸，妈妈和妹妹住在印度尼西亚。我的爸爸是商人。我的妈妈是家庭主妇。我的妹妹是学生。她的专业是建筑。我的哥哥住在澳大利亚。他是科学家。昨天是他的生日。

中文不好学。很高兴认识你。谢谢。

Geez, that was extremely difficult, even with the help of my lecture notes to verify the characters! Let’s see if I got it correct. According to Google Translate, what I typed was:

Hello! I surnamed Wen, called Wenzhenchang. I Indonesian Chinese. I will speak Indonesian, English, Malay words and a little Chinese. I am 23 years old this year. I live in Jurong West, and Singapore. My specialty is electrical and electronic engineering. I read the fourth grade. I will want to be engineers. My phone number is 999.

I have five family: father, mother, brother, sister and me. Father, mother and sister live in Indonesia. My father is businessman. My mother is housewife. I am the sister of students. Her professional construction. My brother used to live in Australia. He scientists. Yesterday was his birthday.

Chinese bad school. Very pleased know you. Thank you.

Hmmm, not so bad I think, though I still need a lot to brush up… It doesn’t help that I could only type the above because I know the Pinyin and I referred to my lecture notes. If I had to write all in Chinese characters, I’ll die… If only there’s such thing as Pinyin to Hanzi converter that we can use during exams… but chances are I’ll end up using all the wrong characters. Haha… Luckily we can write Pinyin for the exams.

Let me know if I got anything wrong k?

wenzhenchang,
hendri

This is the photo that I am going to use for both the Indonesian yearbook and the EEE yearbook.

If you can’t read the blurred text, it says “Computer Engineering”.

Because my heart wishes I was there.

Wishing to be in Computer Engineering,
hendri

PS: Technically, my specialization in EEE is Computer Engineering, that’s why I blocked the words “School of” that actually exist in front of the text “Computer Engineering”. However, the things that we learn in EEE are just scratching the surface of what CE majors do.

PPS: In case it isn’t clear enough, what I really mean is that I want to be in Computer Engineering because I think it suits me more than EEE.

FYP oh FYP, would you be my Valentine?

Planned to finish at least the literature review part of my FYP report today. In the end, this is what I did:

• 13.30: Woke up, and went for lunch.
• 14.30: Back from lunch, played a game, promised to start doing the report in 15 minutes.
• 14.45: Told myself another 15 minutes won’t harm.
• 15.00: Just one more level…
• 16.30: Panicked and closed game. Connected to FYP PC via Remote Desktop and opened Microsoft Word. Felt tired, decided to sleep for half an hour.
• 17.00: Put handphone alarm into snooze.
• 17.09: Put handphone alarm into snooze.
• 17.18: Put handphone alarm into snooze, before turning off the alarm completely.
• 18.00: Finally woke up, and went for dinner.
• 19.00: Back from dinner, lazed around in bed, promised to start doing the report in 15 minutes.
• 19.15: Connected to FYP PC again via Remote Desktop, and restarted Firefox as it had just auto-updated itself.
• 19.20: Checked out what’s new in Facebook. Promised to start doing the report immediately.
• 19.25: Thought that another 5 minutes won’t harm.
• 20.00: Panicked and closed Firefox. Went back to Microsoft Word and opened the report file. Felt tired, decided to sleep for 15 minutes.
• 20.15: Put handphone alarm into snooze.
• 20.24: Put handphone alarm into snooze.
• 21.00: Woke up, wondering how come the handphone alarm turned off by itself. Must be conditioned reflex.
• 21.05: Went to shower, promised to start FYP report after shower.
• 21.15: Started up another game with the intention to stop playing in half an hour.
• 23.00: Panicked and closed game.
• 23.05: Checked out Facebook.
• 01.00: Panicked and closed Facebook.
• 01.05: Decided to blog about the day.
• 01.30: Panics and decides to end blogging right now.

Sometimes this is exactly what I’m feeling day by day. And I’m not even a grad student yet!

[via PHD Comics]

Just what the hell is wrong today?

Now I realised that the notes I brought for the second–and last–lecture of the day is incomplete. Growl.

It’s another bad start of the day today.

I woke up after a long and tiring sleep filled with dreams. I actually woke up in time for the first lesson of the day–EE4756 Computer Architecture lecture–but was too tired to go.

So I ended up packing up my notes for the rest of the lessons in school. While packing the notes, I realised that I had left half a set of notes at the printer. I spent some time rummaging through my notes, hoping to find it, to no avail. But I thought that was alright, I’d just go to the printer and collect the set. I also packed my laptop, with the intention of spending the rest of the afternoon doing my FYP.

I washed up and had lunch, which left me only 5 minutes to rush to class. I rushed from the hawker centre to school. While walking, I suddenly had a bad feeling about my laptop. So I took out the laptop, and lo-and-behold, I forgot to bring my wireless card.

You see, I need to do a remote desktop connection to my FYP PC to do my work. My laptop is an old one which doesn’t have wireless included by default. So I had to buy a PCMCIA wireless card to make it work with the wireless in school. To make it worse, the laptop is not powerful enough to carry out my FYP. Yes, I’ve tried. Waiting for 30 seconds just to perform a single operation is no joke.

Not bringing the card means that I have no access to the network, which practically makes my 3-kg laptop an expensive paperweight.

Well, I thought never mind, worse come to worst I’ll just work in my FYP lab in the afternoon, and then go home to continue. And I thought that would be it.

Oh, how wrong I was. I went to the EE4040 Engineers and Society tutorial and realised that I didn’t bring the correct set of tutorial sheet. Which means that I wasn’t able to follow the lesson properly.

Well I thought that was it.

I walked out of the tutorial room and saw my FYP supervisor. I said hi to him, and he didn’t seem to recognize me. After all, we only met once last year when I started the project, and I haven’t spoken nor met him for almost 6 months, except for occasional emails to submit project reports and progress reports.

And once again, I thought that was it.

And I was proven wrong again. I went to the FYP lab with the intention of starting my work. So I logged in to the PC, plugged in my earpiece to my phone, and lo-and-behold, the right side of the earpiece is dead. The sound will only work when I hold on to the wire connecting the right earpiece to the microphone, which isn’t practical at all for working purposes.

I really hope that this is really the end of the bad day for me.

If there was anything I learnt today, it was that I should always save and close all my work before I lock my FYP PC.

There was this dumbo who used my FYP PC when I was away, even though according to the label displayed, the PC is only to be used for FYP. The label even states which project and who the correct user is.

I was shocked when I saw him, and asked him whether he was supposed to use the PC.

At the same time, I was baffled because I thought that other users can’t access the PC as I thought my user ID was the only one cleared to log on to the PC. Apparently I was wrong. I asked him how he accessed the PC, and he said that he used the school’s STUDENT domain, which means that practically anyone could have used the PC.

Well, at least he apologized and it so happened that before I left, I had just restarted the PC. Imagine if I was taking a break and leave all my work on the PC unsaved, and another dumbo logged on to the PC. That would mean that my account would be logged off, killing all my work in the process.

Save,
bcc

This is NOT a sponsored post.

Just finished with an EndNote workshop…

EndNote centers around a high school student who decides to rid the world of evil with the help of a supernatural notebook that puts an end to anyone whose name is written in it.

EndNote is a commercial reference management software package, used to manage bibliographies and references when writing essays and articles. Among the features are automatic styling of references (very useful for engineering students with a multitude of possible citation styles to follow, e.g. IEEE, ASME, AMS, etc.), and automatic numbering of references. The latter means that if I had numbered references from 1-80, and decide to add a reference before number 1, I don’t have to renumber everything all over again.

Other features include direct importing of references directly from databases commonly used to obtain journal papers such as Science Direct and IEEE Xplore. This means no more fiddling with PDF-format journal articles to figure out who the authors are, when it is published, which journal it is published to, etc.

This is going to be super useful for my FYP.

It’s too bad that I only discovered it now, otherwise my research would have been much easier to manage.