I wanted to join the Tech department for hall concert at first, but I've ended up in Sets. Both have their pros and cons. Tech are the people who will be in charge of the sound and lights during the concert itself. It's supposed to be quite slack during the run up to the concert, but they'll have to skip school during the week when there are rehearsals at UCC.

Sets is in charge of building all the backdrops and scenery which will be used in the concert. We'll have to work from 8-12 pm for four days a week until the concert. During the rehearsals, we'll have to be around to move the backdrops around when they call for scene change. We won't have to skip school, but we'll be working long hours every night. From the academic perspective, I'm not sure which is the better deal. I'm already starting to get lost during the lectures. The tutorials also require a lot of thinking, it's impossible to do them quickly. The mid term tests are after recess week, which is in about 3 weeks time. The timer is only counting down to one of them, but the tests for my other modules should be around that period too.

Maybe I should have joined music, I hear it's quite relaxed, but I can't compose for nuts.

For those of you who haven't realised it yet, this is now week 3 and week 7 isn't that far away.

Thanks to zq's tip, I went to buy a new calculator for $15, instead of the stated price of $20. Actually, $20 is cheap for a calculator with so many functions, but I told the auntie that their shop had charged zq $15 just a few days ago when he helped kenny buy his calc. As a result, she charged me $15 too. By the way, the Popular at Bras Basah Complex is real nice now.

I finally had the opportunity to call MS up last week about my defective keyboard because I came home early enough. They responded quite fast, although the line got cut a few times. By the following week I got an email asking for proof of purchase, and a couple of days later they had delivered a replacement keyboard to my house. Cool huh?? I think I'll bring that one to hall so I can raise my laptop and achieve a more ergonomic working posture.

The tutorials are quite tough, especially the maths ones. They look deceptively short, but the working is quite long and can be tedious too. You must also be really cunning to do them. The manipulation used is basic, but thinking of it is the tricky part. Even with all the free periods, I'm not sure if I can finish :(

In addition to bidding for modules, after that we have to ballot for tutorials. This is precisely what it sounds like. It's like choosing a primary school. If there are more applicants than vacancies, then who gets in is determined by balloting. We get to choose the tutorial group we want and rank our preferences. At the end of the round, the system assigns us to a class. I was fortunate enough to get my first choice for everything, so I have no idea how the appeal process works. That's why there are still no tutorials this week, and I only have 10 hours of lectures for the whole week.

It does seem slack, but the lecturers are going quite fast and it's quite difficult to keep up.

ZQ's right about one thing. This is very different from JC where everything was nicely allocated and scheduled. All we had to do was to show up. Here we get to select the modules we want to take, we choose the time slots, plan our own timetable, weigh the costs of bidding for a module, consider our preferences for tutorial slots. It's all very independent and requires a lot of self discipline, especially as tutorial hours aren't very long either. A lot of this will probably be self study. We need to find out a lot of things by ourselves too. The information is buried all over the place, in obscure and tiny little links which appear suddenly. Sometimes the information contradicts itself. Other times it doesn't appear till it's too late. Well, independent learning.

Lectures started last week, and so did our Inter Block Games. The good thing about IBG is that it's a time to have fun. Anyone who wants to play, regardless of experience, can just go up and have a go. Also, there are caps on the number of seniors allowed, so the 1st years get quite a lot of chances to play. There was one event a day, so I've been playing ball games nearly every day of the week. After the event of the day is over, people usually stay back to play some more, usually until midnight. It's great exercise.

For week 1, we only have lectures, so it's still quite slack. However, the lecturers go very fast, especially for the maths module. I have about 3 hours of lectures a day, so it's been a pretty relaxed week so far.

The problem has been fixed, my dad passed me a new SIM card this morning. Now contactable at the same number.

Went to singtel to do a number swop yesterday. The idea was that the plans would be switched around, maintaining the existing numbers. The lady told us there would be no need to change SIM card.

Halfway through the day, my hp number suddenly changed to one I hadn't seen before. Now the swap is complete and my number is linked to my uncle's SIM card. So if you need to contact me, use MSN for now.

Went to watch the last day of the fireworks with kev, chris, zq and jol. We met at 8pm. However, it was already very crowded. We squeezed for an hour to get to the bridge near the esplanade, and finally ended up blocked by the trees near the river.

As chris predicted, the crowd moved forward a little when the fireworks started, but we were still blocked by trees, so I could only see through the gaps in the leaves and extrapolate the rest of the patterns based on that information. Definitely not the ideal way to watch fireworks. Will have to go much earlier next time. Unfortunately, most of the pics are too blur for anything to be seen so I won't bother putting any up. Go to zq's blog for a couple of nice pics.

Haven't been blogging much lately as I've spent the last week troubleshooting the fujitsu laptop. The preconfigured installation from the school was very slow, and my 1st couple of tries at reinstalling the OS led to blue screens. I'll put the details here so those with fujitsu laptops won't have to figure this out again. Those who aren't interested could stop reading 1 paragraph ago.

The first difficulty is the default partitioning scheme, it was split 55GB/20GB. Personally I felt it should have been the other way round. You don't need 55GB for windows and other programs. Unfortunately the recovery disc offers no option for partitioning. The hard disk is SATA which means that XP installation discs don't have the drivers for it and thus can't detect the drive. The IT Co-op uses Ghost, YH used a slipstreamed XP disc, I used Ubuntu linux. Use whatever works for you.

After recovery, the system will prompt you for the driver disc. It'll seem to hang when it says something like "windows desktop service", or something like that. I only remember it definitely had the word desktop in it. Just be patient and wait.

Next comes joining the domain and doing windows updates. Both should go off smoothly. Do NOT give the domain account administrator rights on your computer. If you do the server will happily push down some software and install it on your computer silently. It'll also ask you if you want to install trend micro office scan. DON'T do that either. It requires a password to uninstall and it can't remove viruses. It'll only tell you they're on your system. Anyway, if you've done windows updates and it asks you about trend micro, you should be getting a blue screen soon. At least I did. It said something about a program trying to execute code in unexecutable memory. It's not a one off error either. Restarting won't help, unless you do it in safe mode. Then you can do a system restore to before the updates. However, I don't think living without critical windows updates is a good idea.

The blue screen will appear in about 4 out of 5 restarts or so. You may get lucky and you won't encounter a blue screen. Most of the time it'll hit within a few minutes of logging in. Sometimes you don't even get to log in. It's that bad.

I brought it down to the co op, and the guy wanted to take it in for checking, but at the last minute he thought of disabling the XD bit functionality in the BIOS. It's under CPU features. That solved the problem, but he didn't know that the function does, and at that time neither did I.

When I got back, I found that it's a hardware feature that can help prevent buffer overflow attacks. That could come in useful and it's such a waste to disable this feature. I did a recovery again, and so far I haven't encountered a blue screen, as I didn't give the domain account admin rights. It also starts up much faster as compared to the preconfigured installation. So far I haven't had to use anything in the network starter kit. I suspect the join domain utility will also give the account admin rights. Whether it'll result in a blue screen I'm not sure, and I'm so sick of doing recovery I'm not going to try anymore. Someone else can experiment and tell me.

Alternatively, you can disable the XD bit function in the BIOS.

I did flag day yesterday. We were supposed to leave at 615 am, but of course everyone was late and we only got to our locations at around 745 am, after school had started. I was outside RJ and there was nearly no human traffic at all. Called my bro out and he made the 1st donation, haha. In the end we walked to J8 for a quick snack, then went back to RJ in time for dismissal. The students were pretty generous.

After lunch, I had to go back to school for a talk, and rejoined my group at Toa Payoh in the evening. Many people had already donated earlier in the day, but some of them were very nice and donated again. I noticed that the well dressed ones tend to keep their money to themselves. Many of them try very hard to avoid eye contact. However, there were still a couple of the well dressed ones who made a donation. The most generous ones were actually the ones who didn't look so well off. They were the elderly and those who weren't dressed formally. Teenagers were quite stingy too, but I met a group of NY people who had done flag day in the morning. Although they had already donated twice, they did so a third time.

I tried to take number 10 home, but although the schedule said that the frequency is about 12-14 minutes, I waited about 25 minutes before a bus actually arrived at the terminal. It was nearly another 10 minutes before it was ready to go. In the end I took 2 hours to get home. Pretty lousy, considering they want to raise fares again. It's not the first time too. I had the same problem on Saturday, but I think I waited around 5 minutes less that day.

Hall orientation started last Saturday, and I haven't been home since then. Just got a laptop, so I'm using that and a borrowed LAN cable to blog.

Some parts of it were like any other orientation you'll find, but others were more interesting. Other than the standard icebreakers with embarrassing forfeits, the other games were good for emphasising teamwork and really made us work together. One of the toughest ones was the Disability game. Each person in the group had disabilities assigned to them. Some only had one, others had up to three. They included being blind, mute, no legs or no hands. We were then told to travel as a group to West Coast Park. It was really difficult to even get started as half the group were mute and couldn't contribute ideas. Others were totally helpless, and it was only after a very long time and a few modifications to the disabilities that we were able to get moving.

Anyway, although I was a bit disappointed at first that I didn't get into my first choice of hall, I think the one I'm in is just fine.