I was looking through my very messy drawer today, hunting for a spare ring file as the two I'm currently using are already overflowing with notes and tutorials. At the bottom of a thick stack of empty paper files, I found one. When I pulled it out, I realised that it was a file I got during JC orientation, with the year written on it.

Hmm, I didn't realise until then it has been half a decade since I first entered JC. It doesn't seem all that long ago when I first entered and met a bunch of new people. To think I've already known them for 5 years, wow.

Anyway, the more pressing issue is that the mid term break has just flown by and my maths test is this coming evening.

The week has passed quickly, and the mid term break is drawing to a close. I have yet to do a single tutorial, although at least I've managed to catch up on maths lectures. But enough of the academic stuff.

This break was different as CNY was near the start of it. It seemed like a quieter affair this year, and a quick poll of my friends confirmed this impression. I suppose there were some who had a great time, but my CNY was just the time for the annual reunion. Yup, I see my cousins about once a year, sometimes a little more frequently, but usually just during CNY.

Went cycling with the platoon guys on wed. We went up and down ECP, it's starting to seem very small. Due to our choice of timing, we were all slightly sunburnt by the end of the ride. Actually we wanted to try overnight cycling, but time was too tight during this break. Maybe during the 3 month vacation...

School starts next week, and so do the mid term tests. All the best to everyone who has some test or the other when school starts.

It's nearly here, after 6 weeks of barely keeping up with everything, I now have 1 week to... continue barely keeping up with everything.

Haven't blogged much recently because life has been quite mundane. Lectures, tutorials, more tutorials, a test, a critique. The test was quite ok, all MCQ and I managed to finish on time. However the critique took much longer. I spent nearly 3 days of my free time on it, trying to understand the passage so I could come up with the necessary arguments. This does not mean it's actually a good piece of work, I'm just slow.

Went for old clothes collection last Saturday. It was another day of traipsing up and down HDB blocks. Unlike Sengkang, the blocks at Clementi are older and thus do not have common corridors on every floor, making it much more difficult to clear each block. Still, we managed to gather huge piles of unwanted clothes and newspapers from the various blocks we went to.

Also on Saturday, I went to watch kent ridge hall's concert. Their storyline was quite ok, and the music was good. It was even performed by a live band during the performance itself. Their story is set in their hall, and it talks about friendships. Of course, there has to be a love story as well. It was quite entertaining. The advantage of such a setting is that they don't need to spend much effort on costumes, since they're all wearing everyday clothes. They also built a huge 2 storey set which didn't move throughout the whole play, meaning they can also save manpower and complexity on set changes. In contrast, our hall production had elaborate hand sewn costumes and many set changes, but we didn't have a live band.

Sunday was the YF anniversary. It went pretty smoothly, including our choir presentation. I was told last minute to play all the other songs for service as well and thus had to sight read through everything. Sounded quite bad.

One more day till the weekend and Chinese New Year. Hope everyone has a great holiday. Don't forget about the 2nd half of the semester.

Remember my last post on a famous hokkien mee stall at Kallang Airport? The one with utterly atrocious service and unable to stand by and guarantee that the quality of their product is acceptable. Let us now contrast that kind of lousy behaviour with the experience I had dealing with Microsoft when my Comfort Curve Keyboard spoilt again.

This time, only the z and spacebar keys stopped working, but that is irritating enough, especially as you can't exactly type without spacebar, and you can't undo without z, haha. I dug up the old email from my previous exchange with them, and told them about the problem. The initial response was made by the next working day and after looking into the matter, they agreed to exchange the keyboard without asking any questions.

Although they were unable to call me on my hp as I was having a tutorial at that time, they emailed me on the same day asking if another model is acceptable. They actually offered the Digital Media Pro Keyboard. Although it doesn't have the ergonomic curve, at least it has the keys in normal positions, and it has many other shortcut buttons around it.

Using the compare prices function on the MS hardware website, it seems like the replacement they offered is worth more than my original one. I had to call up the representative to confirm a delivery date, but once that was done they delivered the replacement to my house at no extra charge.

Now this is service. Microsoft provided a warranty. When their product was defective, they did not try to push the blame to my usage habits or something, but offered to replace it. Instead of requiring me to go to some warehouse, they delivered it. It's this kind of gesture that keeps customers loyal, and our local businesses will do well to learn from this.

Maybe if this keyboard spoils too, I can exchange it again for a better one, and eventually end up with some executive keyboard which costs a couple of hundred dollars. :P For those who don't think there's a chance, check out the guy who traded a red paper clip for a house. http://oneredpaperclip.blogspot.com/
Haha, anyway it's just wishful thinking, I'm not that greedy.