I tried printing my photo of Singapore's nice skyline today. It's the picture I posted up here a while back. The first one was on glossy photo paper, but for some reason there are a couple of vertical lines in the printed photo which shouldn't be there. Hmm, don't know why, so I tried printing another, this time on matte paper. I changed the printing preferences to reflect this, then printed the same photo. However, the matte paper couldn't absorb all the ink!!! There were small pools of ink all over the paper and everything was smudged. I let the ink dry, and the above picture shows the result.

Personally I think it looks a little like an oil painting. The more I look at it the more I like it. So something good came out of this messy print job.

I've been sharing my teaching experiences with chee hui over the past week, as he's also doing relief teaching now. He has kindly allowed me to take an excerpt from his blog, which very nicely summarises our ideals and the reality we face.

We both agreed that teachers are amazing people – not everyone can lead the type of happening and hectic working lifestyle which they have. Primary school teachers are more than just teachers; they are also investigators, disciplinarians, babysitters, judges, listeners… The roles that they play seem to be endless. He was telling me how difficult it was to inspire his students to think on their own and not just leeched on answers i.e. the process is more important than the results, but his students don’t care. Well, I forgave him because some of my students are also more concerned about the final answer than the thinking process.

I was telling him how thankful I would be if he were to be able to instill discipline among his students, as well as create a group of young thinking students. Well, it is hard to do so but that I guess should be the aim of educators. But is it really possible? After all, there are occasions where we do feel totally helpless and demoralized.

Hmm, I don’t know what the rest of you are thinking because if you never taught you wouldn’t know. Yes, some of you think that teaching is a good way to earn money but is that really true? Do you think you are able to handle the young ones of today (or even of yesterday, i.e. YOU)? It is tough, but I’m thankful for my job because the most tiring thing I’m doing now is nagging at my students. Waha! Guess I now fully understand my teachers’ feelings then. Oh ya, for those of you who think being in the army is hard because you have to handle subordinates, think again. Teachers cannot exactly punish their students ‘seriously’, and you are also not exactly working with adults who think. There is also another level of human interaction, i.e. parents, which is involved. So you really do need to balance everything!

Oh well, no matter what I must say that education is important. After all, human resource is Singapore’s most valuable assets. At the end of the day, even if its just 1 or 2 students who benefited from your teachings, you still feel satisfied that you have made a difference to somebody’s life, or even society. Hehe, I’m not been a promoter for MOE, but it is true; there is quite a high level of satisfaction that can be gained from the job. Furthermore, a teacher’s starting salary is one of the highest around. So for those who want a career switch and a challenge, you can try teaching!

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Went chinatown to check out the various travel agencies today. Haven't decided on whether we want to get a free and easy tour or just book everything ourselves. Prices are so high, this will really take a large chunk out of our savings.

After that we went Carl's Jr for dinner, then ended up in the arcade. Saw a game that looked like World Combat. It's one of those shooting games with plastic rifles instead of pistols. Being the trained and well disciplined soldiers we were, all of us had our index fingers outside the trigger guard until the game actually started. All of us except for chris. Actually it was quite a waste of money, we just eyeballed everything, didn't really aim properly, so we died quite fast. I find it quite different aiming in these games as compared to using a real rifle. There's no proper sight.

Hmm, hopefully can decide soon when, where and how we want to go.

Went Cine to watch 8 below with zq, dwin, chris and timo. As expected, Timo was late, what's new?? We went in first without him, which proved to be a good move. He was late by about half an hour. At least we didn't miss the start of a show this time due to tardiness. As a result, dwin saw the few seconds of penguins and immediately concluded that it was a good show. haha, he's just being eldwinic. For those who weren't from my platoon, don't bother looking up that word in a dictionary, it's not there.

The show was about sled dogs, their dedication, obedience, intelligence, willingness to serve, teamwork and loyalty. It was also about their master, his love towards the dogs, treating them as bosom friends. Those sled dogs behaved a lot better than many humans. They served their master with undying loyalty, even in the face of great danger. He reciprocated with loving tenderness towards his charges, treating them as equals. It was touching to watch this incredibly strong bond between the master and his sled dogs.

Actually, I feel that there isn't much substance in the story. What really makes this a good movie are the intense feelings portrayed. The loneliness of being abandoned in the Antarctic wastes, the gut wrenching guilt felt by those forced to abandon their canine friends, these are the moments which make this movie so heart wrenching to watch. It's similar to Coach Carter, another movie with a simple story but such a powerful message of trust and loyalty.

At the end of the show, dwin found something to complain about. There were too few scenes of penguins for his liking.

Went ECP with my parents. Took quite a few pictures of the nice sky. Unfortunately, I forgot that sky pictures usually fool the camera's meter and so I didn't adjust the EV to compensate. Had to edit quite a few pictures as they were underexposed. Looks acceptable now, but I guess it could have been better.

I've added a random quotes feature. Quotes are from the quotations page, wikipedia for the Bushisms and Civilization 4.

After doing 2 days of ushering, I went to a primary school in AMK today for my first taste of relief teaching. Due to the recent controversy about teachers and blogs, I won't put any details here, but you're all welcome to ask. Anyway, if you think being a student is hard, try being a teacher. Just one day has really made me appreciate how much hard work Singapore's primary school teachers put into their job.

Finally found a small part time job, thanks to yh's friend. For the past 2 days, I've been at Biopolis ushering for a symposium. It's quite a relaxing job. The only rushed period was when the guests first arrived and didn't know where everything was. Had to direct them to the auditorium and registration counter. After the talk started, we just stood around doing nothing until lunch, when we showed them where the food and posters were. The organisers allowed us to eat during the lunch break, as long as we took turns and did it out of sight. So a few of us took the food and went to a secluded staircase to eat. The food was really great.

Actually, as long as the talks are going on, the ushers outside have nothing to do, so we just hung around and talked, then direct people during the breaks, and tell them when it's time to go back in.

The second day was more of the same, although this time I was in the auditorium instead of the lobby. People don't like to sit together, so it was quite difficult getting people to compact to the front and center like the organisers wanted. There were so few people that there was little reason why they should move anyway. We did our best, but some insisted on sitting far away in the rear or at the sides. We ended by lunch time, and that's the end of my first stint of work.

Here's a pic of the scenery from my window, taken with my little compact camera on its maximum zoom setting.



The next pic shows the same scene taken with the SAME camera, but with an "optional accessory" attached.



Check out the great zoom!!!!

Went to Marina Square for dinner with ben and yh yesterday. Not surprisingly, ben was late. We were supposed to meet at 7pm. He had just left his house at 7.05pm, so yh and I wandered around to find nice photo taking spots. Here are a few of the shots.


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As you can see, he still hadn't showed up till after the sky turned dark.
Any constructive comments are welcome. High res copies are available here.

What a difference sunglasses make to pictures. Take a look at the first shot here. The focus here is the roof of the house smack in the centre of the picture. In the afternoon, the glare of sunlight from the roof is clearly visible.



This picture here was taken just a few seconds later, but with a pair of sunglasses held up over the lens. Compare the roof with the one in the previous picture. The glare is gone, and the red tiles of the roof can be seen.

Went back to Biopolis again for a rehearsal for my duties on Monday and Tuesday. It was quite a waste of time actually. They rehearsed with the emcee, so the ushers just sat there and watched. Near the end, they called a couple of them to practice opening the door in preparation for the arrival of the VIP. The rest of us didn't do anything.

Since it ended early, I went with YH to Funan as he wanted to buy ink for his newly revived printer. After that we walked around a bit to look at laptops. We stopped to look at a Lenovo one, and the salesperson asked if we needed help. YH asked him whether he thought a Centrino Duo or a Turion is better. The guy said, "Of course Centrino Duo lah, it's like I give you a Pentium 2 and a Pentium 3, which one would you say is better?" These may not be the exact words he used, but the gist of the message is there. We were a little confused now, how can he compare Centrino and Turion like Pentium 2s and 3s? It's like comparing an RJ yr 1 pupil to an RJ yr 2 pupil and using that to draw conclusions about academic differences between a VJ yr 2 student and an RJ yr 2 student. Obviously the logic if flawed. I think he doesn't know what a Turion is.

The next question stumped him too. YH asked him about 64 bit support for intel processors. He was instantly lost and wanted to know which component YH was talking about. Then he admitted defeat and said, "I don't know about this 32 bit 64 bit stuff as customers usually ask me about clock speeds."

For the readers who don't know what a Turion is or what 32 bit and 64 bit is about, if you're not a laptop salesman, it's ok. If you are, you better go find out and stop trying to smoke your way through.

Anyway, I need to do more reading myself to fully understand the issues involved, but then I'm not a computer salesman, haha.

I changed the post date so it reflects more accurately when this occurred.

YH introed me to a temp job his friend had. Ushering for a seminar at Biopolis. Went down for the briefing this afternoon. Was nearly late because of a stupid handphone problem. I was supposed to meet up with YH at Eunos as he had driving lesson. The ideal situation would be for him to get on the same train as the one I took from Bedok. I'm sure many of you have tried this stunt before and know that good communication is key to this. I called him at Bedok to check if he was already at Eunos, and told him I'm currently waiting for the train, and I'll call him when I neared the station. Unfortunately, I think I lost handphone reception in the tunnel between Kembengan and Bedok. When I was nearly at Eunos, I tried to call him, but my phone said "SOS calls only". Tried to call again, but it was too late as the train had already pulled into the station. I kept a lookout from my place beside the door and saw him, so I started moving to the back of the train, hoping he would get on then we could just meet up. The train started off again and only then did I manage to get through, to find out that he didn't board the train, so I had to get off at Paya Lebar and wait for the next train, which delayed us by about 7 mins.

We only got to Buona Vista at 3.30pm, when we were supposed to be at the place at 3.30pm. We jogged most of the way there, luckily they hadn't started when we got there. Basically my job will be to tell the participants where to go. The actual event will be on Mon and Tues but there's a rehearsal tomorrow. The nice thing is that they'll be paying for all the time that we go down, so that includes the briefing time. However, because of this, I missed the interview at another company that was supposed to be today. Well, a bird in hand is worth two in the bush, so I thought I'll go for this one instead. Tried to reschedule the interview but the guy doesn't seem to be very interested. He's always in meetings when I call him.

Went to play badminton with some of the YF yesterday. Joline faked me, told me she lacks coordination. It sounded like those people who ask you, "Can I join your soccer game? I'm not very good, so bear with me." Then those same people will proceed to outdribble, outrun, out-tackle and outscore everyone who was playing. Actually she's not bad at all, but always play high ball, play until my neck ached, haha.

After a long hiatus, I've finally picked up my pair of skates again. Went to ECP this morning with kev, kenny and zq. Kenny and zq have never skated before, while kev is a pro, so we got him to teach us. At the end of 2 hours, the 2 of them can move around the beginner's area, while I've managed to remember most of what I could do before, which isn't very much, haha.

After that, we took a slow walk over to Parkway for lunch. Walked around a bit, but we were very tired so we sat down on a bench outside M1 and called chris. He had already collected his IC so we waited for him to join us for lunch. Being too lazy to move, all 4 of us just sat there till he showed up. Went fish and co for lunch, they had an offer. $16.90 for 1 person meal including main course, starter and drink. $14.90 per person for a 2 person meal including 1 starter dish, 2 main courses and 2 drinks. We split everything among ourselves. Tried out the new york fish and chips. It's basically the original one with cheese inside it. It was pretty good, but I felt that there was a bit too much cheese for my liking. Wanted to get chris to give us an ord treat but in the end we took pity on him and split the bill, haha.

Skating was fun, hopefully next week they'll be free then go again, esp kenny, who is now filling up his last free day of the week with tuition.

Added the sunset picture in one of my earlier posts as a header picture. It'll appear between 6 and 8 pm when the remainder of the current second divided by 3 is equal to 2. =)

Went Kev's house today with hock and kenny. Played a single player game of civ4 on his computer. Kenny and I finally got to watch the intro movie and wonder movies in civ4. We also got to appreciate the wonderful detail in the game world itself. You see, our graphics cards aren't good enough, we're both using GeForce 4 MX, so we were forced to switch off all the eye candy so the game can run properly. In his case, he has to hit ESC to stop every wonder movie or else the game will hang. In my case, it's so jerky it's totally ruins the experience. However, as Kev has a Radeon 9800Pro and 1GB of RAM, we could watch the intro movie, turn up all the graphics to maximum, and watch the wonder movies as they came up during the game.

The attention to detail in Civ4 is really great. The fishes frolic in the sea, the elephants which mark the ivory resource move around and swish their tails. On my computer, it's static. The workers wield spades, hammers, or whatever tools are necessary for the improvement they're supposed to build. The trees sway in the wind. Iron sparkles. You can see the cart leaving the mines and the fire from the bellows. Happy cities have fireworks over them. During combat, it zooms in and shows the combat sequence. You see arrows flying, muskets firing, the units falling. It was really engaging. When I play on my own computer, it's like a chess game. I move the piece there and I either win or lose. While the concept is still the same, on Kev's computer I can watch the battle being played out.

We played on the easiest level with the fastest speed setting to watch as many wonder movies as possible. I can only watch the first couple of them before it gets too jerky. Today I got to watch most of them in all their glory. The Sistine Chapel one was beautiful. After showing the outside, it showed the inside, with the light shining through the windows and the intricate paintings on the walls and ceilings. However, by the time I got to the Kremlin, even his computer is starting to lag. Meanwhile, I've wiped out Julius Caesar's empire and I'm preparing for war with Asoka. Once that's done, I'll have control over the whole continent. However they're only a 60+ turns left to go and another 4 civilizations to conquer. Maybe we'll be forced to take a Time victory.

After more than a year of talk only, the platoon shirt is finally becoming a reality. Kev and Hock went Beach road today to place the order. Since we don't have so many people, it'll be quite expensive, but never mind, it's a once in a while thing.

I got a call yesterday from a company telling me I had been shorlisted for an "interview". The thing is, I had never sent them any application information, but I thought I'll go down anyway and take a look. After half an hour of waiting around, I saw a manager who explained to me the basics of what the company did. They sell a water purification system. Next another guy gave me a 1 hr explanation of what's so great about their water. According to him, SG tap water is slightly acidic, and this is not good for humans. They claim it is better for health to drink alkaline water. Erm, wonder if any bio students can clarify this point.

Next, the water is apparently full of energy. This was proven with a black box with a large 100 watt light bulb and a voltmeter with 2 electrodes. When I place the electrodes in tap water, the bulb doesn't light, but when I place it in their water, it lights. The black box was connected to the AC mains. I felt this experiment only proved that the water is ionised, like they said, but I can't see how it relates to people feeling more energetic. Any chem or bio ppl can comment?

The water is also supposed to have smaller molecules than tap water and have detoxification properties. I thought water molecules were all the same size, but he did a tea leaf experiment to justify that claim. He told me to put equal amounts of tea leaves into the 2 cups, 1 with the special water and 1 with tap water. The logic was that the water that coloured faster has smaller molecules. I'm starting to regret not taking chem already, haha. Then he put iodine into both cups (without tea leaves). On stirring, the iodine colour disappeared in the special water, while it remained in the tap water. Now I'm really starting to regret not taking chem. This was to demonstrate the cleansing property of the water. Then the guy proceeded to drink up the water to show that it was safe.

Finally he let me try a bit of it. It tasted fishy to me. But apparently this fishy taste means I don't drink enough water regularly. If I have well balanced body chemistry, the water is supposed to taste sweet. This is supposed to be a property of the calcium ions in the water. Oh by the way, it contains calcium ions, not regular calcium, so it's supposed to aid calcium absorption into the body. I don't know how that works.

After this explanation, I went back to the manager's office where he spent a very long time explaining how network marketing works. It sounds like a great concept in theory, but I don't really like the idea of asking my friends to buy stuff from me because I need to sell it. Basically it uses the power of word of mouth advertising to bring product recognition and sales to the company. It's really a nice concept, if you're at the top, cause all your underling sales are considered yours too, and it looks like you can get a nice cut out of doing nothing. However, he stressed that this is not a pyramid scheme.

I turned them down in the end. Although I spent 3 hours there, I don't feel that the time has been wasted. I got to see first hand an example of how they sell their product, and I also got a very detailed explanation about network marketing.

Seems like everyone is mentioning the heavy rain of the past 2 afternoons. There seems to be a pattern. It'll start off as a nice bright afternoon, then the clouds will come in at around 3pm and it'll rain very heavily till the evening. Happened again today too, but I don't think the rain was so heavy. Anyway, since I was mostly at home, the rain didn't affect me much. I just worried about the risk of lightning frying my computer, but luckily it didn't happen.

On the plus side, the rain cleared the sky and allowed me to get some wonderful sunset pictures.


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It's been a long time since I programmed anything in c++, but dwin passed me this question and I just couldn't resist the challenge.

http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~cs1101cl/lab4/oddweek/

Ok, I know the question asked for c but I'm not too familiar with that so I used c++. Just downloaded the dev c++ IDE. I don't really like it, it's small but the text editing is very manual, it doesn't even indent my lines properly. Spent the whole afternoon working on the question and finally managed to solve it, haha.

This is unrelated, but anyway, I saw an article last week which mentioned something about search engines. It mentioned that in 2002, graduate students at Tel Aviv University were asked to find on the web, with no time limit, a picture of the Mona Lisa, the complete text of either Robinson Crusoe or David Copperfield and a recipe for apple pie accompanied by a photograph. Only 15% succeeded at all 3 tasks.

I had a go at it. The Robinson Crusoe text was the hardest to find. The first link didn't seem to work, so I had to go a bit further down, but the other 2 showed up very quickly on google. Maybe it's 2006 and there's more content on the web now, so the stuff was easier to find as compared to 2002. Have a go, it shouldn't be too difficult.

Went ECP with YH yesterday. I borrowed his bike then we cycled there. Main aim was to get some photos at sunset. Unfortunately it was going to rain, but that allowed us to get some nice photos too.


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Most of the pictures were taken with his camera, which had a lot more options than my little compact one. I'll need to get a tripod too, a couple of the pics are blurred because they were handheld as we used the tripod with his camera.