Action plan.

This came up when me and SOMEONE was bored studying in PGP and he started telling me about this gal he's interested in, who seems to be interested in him also... haha..or so he thinks. =P

It's sort of a one month action plan to get to know her better. Try and decipher what we are writing about... quite cute. Two relatively inexperienced blokes trying to brainstorm over BGR issues, what can be more sure-fail?? =)

But this plan was never carried out, thank goodness. No prize for guessing whose it is. =D

The Friendster thingy post.

Oh man... Friendster is NP-complete...

I'm not a Friendster person but it all started when I got curious enough to find out if there are any mutual friends between me and my friends, and if there are any friends I know who are not in my Friends List.

3hrs.

That's how long it took to complete 1 circle of friends, up to 3 degrees. With an addition of 104 friends.

It started off with WPS and somehow drifted over to NUS and RI/RJ, then Scouts. And the discovery process is filled with personal thoughts including:

1) Eh? How come he know her??
2) Wah lau, how come he looks so "act cool" here??
3) Piang, she never look so chio in real life leh...
3) Wah... chio... droolz... (somehow digressed to voyeurism :p)
4) How come got Andy Lau avatar?
5) So long never see him/her, now look so different...
6) How come got Stephanie Sun avatar??

And because of the 2.5 year lag due to NS, I find some of my male seniors knowing some of my female friends (same age), and some of my female friends (2yrs younger) knowing some of my male juniors. How interesting.

If I know you, do add me to your Friendster using the link on the right. So I need not 海底捞针.

I'm a 3rd born. So the test is wrong...

You Are Likely A Forth Born

At your darkest moments, you feel angry. At work and school, you do best when your analyzing. When you love someone, you tend to be very giving. In friendship, you don't take the initiative in reaching out. Your ideal jobs are: factory jobs, comedy, and dentistry. You will leave your mark on the world with your own personal philosophy.

The Birth Order Predictor

To my dearest Kelly

(WARNING: THIS IS A VERY LONG POST. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO READ IT IF YOU'RE A WUSSY WHO CANNOT TAKE LONG POSTS. YOU CAN TRY TO FINISH THIS POST, BUT IF YOU STOP HALFWAY, YOU'RE STILL A WUSSY. SO WHY START? [ok, I'm trying to make you read it...])

Haha... don't be jealous lah, Kelly.

Just that I've not been mentioning you in my blog doesn't mean that I never think about you leh. It's just that you're in philly having a whale of a time while I'm stuck in Singapore - there's not much interaction to generate anything interesting lah.

I shall reiterate your position here in my heart and a bit of our personal history, ok? Come come, sayang sayang...
All about Kelly:
Kelly's my bestest friend since primary school (I knew Kelly since primary 1~~1988~~!)
(We would wear the same underwear if we could, but our size's just too different... :p)

Ok, THIS PICTURE IS SO GAY...

PRIMARY SCHOOL:
I still remember when all of us in class would borrow his colour pencils (he had one of those Colleen 30-pen/60-colour mega-variery colour pencils) which he lends jovially.. He's the head prefect of WPS and he has been super tall since birth (we contrast a lot, yes.) and we always make fun of him and Qingyi (the also super tall head prefectress who is also his neighbour.) I think Kelly still has a photo of us taken during our childhood. It's a super nice but humiliating one. It showed me as a short, undergrowing (and still undergrown now) boy next to another goony-looking boy who was 1 head taller. Hmmm...

There were many many days after school when I would go to his house in Braddell View and play with him. I shall not boast about his mega tower racks of game collections for him, but they deserve a mention.... Anyway, his house is like a mini funworld, complete with all kinds of gaming consoles, and 2 computers~! That was during a period of time when 2 computers in a house, side by side, was unheard of~! And I love his Transformers. Esp. Victory Leo and Star Sabre. Haha... those were the days.

And yes, the days of ping pongs at the clubhouse, when he would annoy me with his fancy schmancy moves which completely fail to astound me but made me think him an innovative goo goo doll. At least he's innovative. Goony, but still innovative.

"Look at my super duper smash~!"

What about the times spent at the playground with ice cream treats after that? Haha... nice. Except for the fear of spiders and their annoying spider webs.

But amongst all these memories, one thing stood out most to tell that Kelly is my friend for life.

I stole from Kelly before. Yes I did. =| (Frank, you bad bad boy...)

Kelly had limited access to the outside world then, as his maid always brings him home after school - but I was free as a lark to traverse playgrounds and play catching and buy those Dragonball Cards which were so popular then. I wasn't addicted to the DBZ cards, but I was quite mad over the Artist Cards. Quite quite mad.

Son Gyoku

Anyway, Kelly was quite quite mad over the DBZ cards (he has a sizeable collection!), and there were times he bought them through me. Like pay me $5/$10 dollars to buy them. But there was one time when greed overtook me and I kept one of those much prized shiny gold cards.

Kelly found out. But he never got angry with me. He simply asked me why I did it, and it made me feel all the more guilty because I could feel that he was hurt by my actions because I was a very close friend to him. Not angry, but hurt. Not retaliative, but simply asking, 'Why?'

That's a kind of love I've never seen before, and it was then that I thought to myself.. "Rongkang you shithead. This is a friend in the truest sense that you will never come across again in your life. Treasure him."

From then on, even though he can be a pain in the ass sometimes with his idiosyncracies and I do get really really annoyed by him occassionally, I know that I am stuck with him forever. Sigh. What to do? Best friend mah...

And to end off this primary school chapter, I must tell everyone that Kelly can't spell for nuts. Horrigible. He can't even spell if you gave him dictionary.com to reference. :p

But he has good handwriting, so it's a redeeming grace.

Kelly can't spell for nuts

SECONDARY SCHOOL:
Ah... secondary school in RI. Yes. Yes. Yes.

I lost contact with the bugger for a while, immersed in playing catch up with schoolwork, surviving softball training, and trying to be a good librarian (like my bro!)

Then in Sec 3, I quitted softball and joined RI02 Scouts (where Kelly's in) - thus began a new chapter of our friendship.

Going through thick and thin and making a few more close friends between us (TCWITB, for one), we perservered through our Venture years and GC years, leading our scout group through a period of total chaotic anarchism filled with question marks and no answers except for stupid ones. We tried for the President's Scout Award together, but all save me was axed by the SRIC.

Now this is the point where I'm supposed to go 'nally nally boo boo' to them, but I must also reflect that I was the first President's Scout to have 'almost failed because of the final interview' (as admonished by Edmond Tan, our great abominable VSL.)

Yeah, it was fun.

JC times
None available. Kelly chose the alternative path of going Ngee Ann Poly and excelled there with Yusry. But hey, GC years were still on in JC 1, and I saw enough of the Man.

Army times
Can't remember clearly, but I think this is the period me and chee wee and kelly integrated with Kelly's friends over in poly...

Uni times to now
Yup, I see him around school frequently, and have taken 'Principles of Marketing' with him. He's a real good marketing genius, I tell you (though I got A+ and he didn't! nally nally boo boo~~! :p)
But he's the more driven ass, and he's now in philly doing his NOC.

Oh yah, we recently also went for the N.E.X.T Challenge together (with Chee wee and ivan and joey) and got 4th prize! Woo hoo~! N.E.X.T


In essence, Kelly, the friendship between us is unbreakable lah, no matter how sick we are of each other (urgh, puke).

Our friendship is like Gravity - it's all around us and transcends over time and space. And it's the greatest force when summed together!

Post exam blues

Haiz. NO exams already leh... How am I going to spend all my IDLING HOURS????

Should I try fishing?

Haha. Not really. Don't kill me just yet.

My blues are about the current state of my education career.

At the end of yesterday's MOBILE COMPUTING paper, I knew that my First Class is a goner (regardless of my fluk-ish CA marks); at the end of today's SIGNALS, it is more than less confirmed that my First Class has taken a plane to Timbuktu on first class seating and won't be back for good. I estimate B+ for both - which means my CAP will drop to around 4.48 - quite good for 2nd Upper, but slightly missing the First Class.

To Timbuktu, with Love.

Not that I'm plain just-kill-me kind of sad. I'm rather both sad and happy. I've sort of planned for both the if-and-else cases, but have always been annoyed at the uncertainty of whether it's an 'IF' or an 'ELSE' - but it's quite quite confirmed that I fall into the 'ELSE'-case now, and I'm the happier for it. Though I'm still sad I'm not 'First Class' material (dammit!)


Why the heck am I happier?
Would you not be happier if you didn't have to spend the rest of your academic life slogging in your lab trying to polish up your FYP to A/A- grade, with another module to score A/A- as well? And for what purpose? A first class cert? Yah, it looks good but is it worth the effort?

IF-CASE: (Still in range of First Class)
PIA FOR FIRST CLASS STILL. WORK WORK WORK while worrying that the final result is still a 2nd Upper. Simple but tedious plan. =(

IF-CASE

ELSE-CASE: (Fall to 2nd Upper)
2nd Class => Lots of CAP buffer => Can anyhow do my FYP and CRITICAL SYSTEMS module next semester~~~!
This then means that I can spend time doing things OUTSIDE of academics. Academics is starting to bore me - so, yay.

ELSE-CASE

In essence, I can work up some untidy codes and kiss Ananda [FYP Sup] goodbye by the end of the holidays and spend the next semester doing self-improvementsss:
1) Improving my memory
2) Going for Toastmaster + polish communication skills (which I super lack)
3) Grasp the tacky techniques of windsurfing and inline-skating
4) Salsa?
5) Do some business (Frank has a cunning plan~~~!)
6) Go for unregistered classes (like Marketing, French, ++)

Isn't that infinitely more interesting and wonderful? After all, I'm seriously contemplating a non-engineering career.

My dream career.

Daylight saving hours in NUS??

PGP people are mad, I tell you.
420am in the morning, got time don't sleep go play swing at playground.

It almost feels like 9pm in the cluster - everyone's light is still on and music is playing on laptops. People are bathing and asking 'How's revision?' in the toilet.

And I looked downstairs, half-expecting Taichi Man to be down there doing his routine.

Crazy people.

--------------

Sidenote:
Now that there are going to be as many cubicles in female toilets as there are the sum of urinals and cubicles in male toilets, I'm led to wonder if male toilets should totally abolish urinals and have all cubicles instead.

I mean, if 4 gals can do their *ahem* MNC at one time, compared to 2 guys doing their *ahem again* MNCs(with another 2 only able to do SMEs) is it still fair? Or is it a case of one being fairer than the other?

Sometimes, the battle for equality doesn't result in equality after all. Perhaps it had always been equal in the macro-scale. Just not equal in aspects where we choose to focus on.

Like:
"cos(90) + i * sin(90)" not being the same as "cos (45) + i * sin(45)" if you choose to compare them in either their real or their imaginary form. But their magnitude and power are the same - it's just a phase-difference between the two.

Who says Singapore don't have seasons?

T'is the season when it rains and rains
and irritating flying insects with disproportionately long wings
go forth and multiply
and die and end up in your toilet bowls and sinks.

Flush.

And you see gleeful hordes of ants engage in the thriving business of carcass-collecting, in every corner of your room.

Hmm... maybe I won't kill them. For now. =)

The only way to get away with horrific singing...

... is to package it with some simple and cute animations.

*Frank breaks into horrific singing and juggles 3 balls at the same time*

24 pushing 25 and I'm still a boy??? Sigh...

Was going for my breakfast at the SoC canteen after a really cold night of sleep in the lab, when I was stopped along the s16 corridor by an SoC admin staff whom I was familiar by face with. She was hanging around the corridor doing the horrific task of shushing everyone into silence, as an exam was going on then.

She shuushed me to stop.

"Shuush, boy~~!" she went.

"Erm yah?" I paused.

"Help me buy coffee. Normal one," and she handed me 50 cents.

I stopped for a while to think how I should respond.

"Nothing like an ol' strong morning brew"

Firstly, I wasn't really chummy with her - I don't even know her. I mean we know each other by face and encounter in the admin office (when I go over to hand in SEP application; to ask about my teaching pay++), but we never did know each other by name or if we really do know each other by a 5-hop link of friends (caveat: your friends' friends' friends' friends' friends can be Bill Clinton...)

Secondly, I AM A BOY??! I'm freaking 24 and I can:
1) drive a car (I'll proudly show you my driving license anytime, especially if you can't drive - guffaws);
2) sign my own consent forms;
3) watch RA movies (more guffaws);
4) travel overseas without holding my mother's hands (hmmm...?)

the only thing that I can't do is earn my own keep (that'll be next year) and that's because I'm still schooling. So which part of my life constitutes a 'Boy'????

But sigh, this frame of contemplation didn't last for more than 15 milliseconds (ok, it was more of an afterthought), before I replied "OK~~!", like a boy who was eager to deliver a package in his local neighbourhood for the DHL man in exchange for a sweet or something. Except there wasn't any sweet in the one-sided bargain.

"You drive a hard bargain.... here's your sweet."

Sigh.... I guess I'm still a boy. At least I'm more chummy with her now. Her name's Devy.

可惜不是你

歌手：梁静茹

这一刻突然觉得好熟悉
像昨天今天同时在放映
我这句语气原来好像你
不就是我们爱过的证据

差一点骗了自己骗了你
爱与被爱不一定成正比
我知道被疼是一种运气
但我无法完全交出自己

努力为你改变
却变不了预留的伏笔
以为在你身边那也算永远
仿佛还是昨天
可是昨天已非常遥远
但闭上双眼我还看得见

可惜不是你陪我到最後
曾一起走却走失那路口
感谢那是你牵过我的手
还能感受那温柔
那一段我们曾心贴着心
我想我更有权力关心你
可能你已走进别人风景
多希望也有星光的投影
努力为你改变
却变不了预留的伏笔
以为在你身边那也算永远
仿佛还是昨天
可是昨天已非常遥远
但闭上双眼我还看得见

可惜不是你陪我到最後
曾一起走却走失那路口
感谢那是你牵过我的手
还能感受那温柔
可惜不是你陪我到最後
曾一起走却走失那路口
感谢那是你牵过我的手
还能感受那温柔
感谢那是你牵过我的手
还能温暖我胸口