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this show was created 4 years ago. great vision the producers had!

"and with wireless bluetooth technology, iPad sets you up for fast uploading without all that water-bloating!"

I only seem to blog when exams come around!

I actually have a DECEMBER 2009 post on COMMON TESTS which I fell asleep typing (yeah I remember this bit). so I will go wrap up that one and publish it just for the sake of it.

for this round of final exams, I have 3 completed, namely marketing, accounting and service operations management.

the final whammy comes from the final boss International Economics and Finance. I interviewed a survivor from the last round of attacks who confirmed that it causes +9999999 damage. he/she suspects the game programmer aka Miss Koh (the tutor, not my imaginary sister) activated the GOD MODE cheat on that paper.

wow that was cold. but that paper is probably the most difficult BA paper in NP. nobody I know taking that module wasnt worried about it.

but lets just do a week in review first.

==

this exam season was really different due to the extreme proximity to chinese new year. my exams begin the same week as CNY. last year there was quite a healthy gap. it was either one week plus before or after CNY that exams begun. with CNY being Feb 3 next year, it seems next year wont be as disruptive as this year's either.

because of this strictly non-beautiful coincidence, I went about my usual chinese new year duties lugging my notes and my heavy heart along, squeezing in study when I am not distracted.

this includes helping my sixth uncle at the market on 年二九, then going for a reunion dinner (usually at grandma or sixth uncle place, this year at sixth uncle) on 年三十, visiting paternal grandma and going 观音庙 to 拜拜 on 初一, maternal grandma visiting and my second uncle house with the lion dance on 初二 as well as the final visit to my 大伯 on the first weekend of CNY.

it sounds very compact, but we are often traveling some distance over public bus so it wasnt as speedy as you think. I tend to look out into scenery when taking buses, which as you might realise kinda hinders studying.

its also kinda sad to be mugging while everyone is kind of in an unlifted, festivish mood.

you hear chatter but you know you cant join the relatives in their conversations.

you see all the shows on TV happily celebrating with red splashed all over the decor, while the only red you see would be that of the result slip if you continue watching TV.

so yes, my point is it was depressing. I must really wean myself off being so wordy.

I told you all my usual CNY schedule since this year, I visited my 大伯 on a sunday at his market stall at Macpherson Estate on the day before AAA, thanks to following the usual CNY schedule. thus AAA revision was disrupted here and there and I even saw a pad (yes the girly monthly one) with DRIED BLOOD lying on the ground while walking to the kopitiam for lunch there.

during CNY some more. some more I saw a black cat running past. no wonder my AAA paper took a KO.

this bit of background information about my life will lead on to my usual review.

==

saturday was marketing and the consensus was that the paper wasnt difficult. everyone seemed to have hit the right points. the consensus was also that the paper was really straightforward with what they want with bold and underlines.

heard this was due to the common test which wasnt as well as expected. an easy start to the exam season.

accounting was the next on monday morning. this one wasnt as straightforward, especially the partnership question. this is again a consensus. I only managed to complete the paper just in time before the 2 hours after being stumped by the first for some time.

personally I know of a capital adjustment account mistake in that question, a depreciation expense mistake in the company accounts one and a ratio mistake from using the wrong inventory in FSA one.

did not bother to tabulate how much marks that was. no need to make myself feel sadder for no reason. over already la.

SOM follows closely on tuesday. before that, may I just ask why do they keep putting SOM on directly the next day after a paper? dont they realise most poly students are the last minute type (me too) and doing this twice in a row will drag scores for that module down?

this also meant my memory of SOM preprations was always that of extreme rush and fatigue.

the paper was pretty standard in terms of calcuations questions. I avoided the EOQ question due to the cash discount part, which really wasnt that straightforward even in tutorials.

one thing about SOM is that there is so much theory in it that you dont know which ones are actually more important and you have to prepare for nearly all the theory.

I am glad some of those I skipped didnt come out. unfortunately those I merely glanced through made an appearence, like benchmarking. well.

heard BFS people had four papers straight on fri, sat, mon and tue and had ended now. dont know whether to congratulate them since there is hardly any time for last minute preparation and its very tiring taking one onslaught after another like this. if it was me I would have crumbled, so good job there!

so I shall now end this so I can go ahead and prepare for the beyond godlike final boss. good luck for all those who still have papers!

wondering what brought me back to blogging? do read on if you want to know why a smile is not going to return to my face for a while.



the song above is 雨爱 by rainie yang in her latest album. it is unique cos I typically like faster songs and this is one of the few times I like a slow song so much. you might want to play this while reading this long, long post.

the melancholic and rainy feel of the entire song is totally rubbing off on me in my current state.

if you hate to know more background about the issue and just want to know the "lessons" from my notebook, you can skip to the fourth section.

==

my mood is at one of the lowest points in quite a long time, my heavy heart dragging the body along on this ride that I didnt sign up for. whizzing through this ride that is marked by more downs than ups, the influence of my mood pushed the brain to reflect on my recent life.

just early this week, I was in a point much higher than I am now. the first of two BCOMM table topics assessment (preparing a 3 minutes speech with only 3 minutes preparation time) was over, both IEF and SOM reports were safely in the hands of the respective tutors, and PMKT is an obstacle that will unleash its true form only a week plus later.

I bought tickets to the Y.E.S. 93.3 anniversary show, had plans to idle my long thursday away and to go on my regular day tours into Johor Bahru with Melissa on friday.

well, they did materialise eventually, just that I went through the motion in a different mood and frame of mind.

==

when I reached home on thursday, my notebook failed for the seventh time. for the record, the first time its the screen, second and third times the hard disk, fourth the latch, fifth the power adaptor, sixth the motherboard (which caused the screen to go fuzzy and unusable no less).

I am pretty much indifferent to having the notebook fail on me by now. whatever promises then about paying premium prices ($2264 to be exact) for Fujitsu's quality had flown right out of the window when my hard disk failed twice in a row a day before my CATS final project deadline. I was the only holder of the compiled data and video then and we had to plead for a deadline extension.

that happened one month plus after they replaced my hard disk for the first time. my life was in a total mess as I was left without a notebook for a whole week and had to take notes by hand.

any other failures since then became a part of me. I told myself that if I had more money, I would get a new notebook and hit the current one with a hammer, stamp it under my feet, throw it against the wall a few times and set it on fire. I am not exaggerating, especially under my circumstances now.

==

the hard disk has failed for the third time.

the notebook has been pretty well behaved since the motherboard replacement, and I thought it has finally learnt its lesson after changing a major component of the notebook.

wrong.

but because of my own complacency, I hadn't been making backups as regularly as year 1, when failures were as common as having thunderstorms in singapore.

I just sent my notebook to a reputable data recovery company. they are still evaluating it even though it is supposed to take only 6 hours or so.

charges will begin from S$500 to as high as S$3000.

in order to make time to fulfill my promise to mel, we took a cab down to Changi (don't bother asking how much that cost) to send the cursed notebook in, and took the Changi Business Park shuttle bus and transferred to 168 to reach the customs at 3.

because the evaluation is taking so long, I am prepared for the worst. the very same heart that brought my mood to a crashing low alternated between worrying about whether the data can be gotten back (since there is no guanratee when it is a physical damage) and the cost of getting it back if it is possible.

after recovery (if possible), I will need to send my notebook in to Fujitsu and demand an explanation for all my loss of productivity. they better have some fucking great reason for this phenomena.

I probably won't be able to get my notebook back running till late next week at the very earliest. so I will be falling back on pen and paper again?

it is three weeks plus from final exams and some lecturers are beginning revisions. how do I note what to focus on when I don't even have my notes of this semester?

the original IEF notes probably had only 5% of the actual lecture material which I had noted down but since gone. how do I prepare for (probably) the most difficult business module in NP?

marketing project is due next next week. how do I work without a notebook?

==

my notebook has dealt quite a huge blow to me since I value my notes a lot, which is made worse by the urgency of this ending semester.

I daresay I am in a state of daze since thursday. I havent gotten much proper sleep from worrying about the damage evaluation that just doesnt come and its cost.

I think something inside me changed. this isn't exactly the most appropriate life-changing event, but it set me thinking about giving and receiving.

if recovery costs prove to be too exorbitant or if its impossible to recover the data, I would have to seek my friends' assistance in lending me your notes.

I believe I had been trying my best to offer what I could during lectures and tutorials to all of you sa well. I may appear impatient at times to do so, but I nearly always deliver in the end.

I wonder what kind of crisis I am going to be in right now if I had chosen to succumb to my selfish side and not help others when they need it. I may not have been the most helpful person, but I do try my best.

also, never just listen to what the majority agree upon. most Fujitsu users have zero failures, some once or twice, mine has failed me as wonderfully as the seven colours of the rainbow.

I use my notebook less often than my friends. I dont use it at home since I have a desktop. it is practically idle during the long vacations unless I have work to do. I nearly don't play games on it. it is protected by antivirus and constantly patched against new vulnerabilities. I housekeep and reinstall Windows before a new semester and I wipe it physically at least once every two days.

compared to most others, I think my notebook had a good life. the only thing might be that I bring it to school daily while others may do so only once or twice a week, but that is what half of the tertiary students do as well!

I can say with confidence that I know enough about technology to make sure my computers are well maintained. so why is this happening?

is this karma from my past life? or just plain luck? I don't know.

the thoughts about karma and getting back what you had gave has taught me to be more kind. a few personal friends who talked to me yesterday and today may have noticed that my advice is slightly different now.

in life, what goes around comes around. if I harbour selfish thoughts, it is only natural for others to do the same unto me. likewise, being more understanding does not mean I have everything to lose. that is the most important lesson I am taking away from this incident.

finally, I hope to seek your understanding if I dont appear especially upbeat over next week. it isnt easy paying at least half a grand to recover data when your family only makes enough to get by life without starving. to everyone who managed to read till here, I sincerely thank you for sharing my sorrow and do back up before its too late.

woot finally an unrecycled picture!

I decided to shift the advertisements panel back to the sidebar. after all putting it at the top doesnt mean more people will click it anyway.

I will proceed to remove the entire top section if I cant think of any new uses for it. any suggestions?

I have also updated the links section, since the "More Active" and "Less Active" links are kind of misleading, considering I dont update my template a lot nowadays since I am a "Less Active" blogger nowadays as well. embarrassing.

so now I will just put the date of my last checking of links and segregate into an upper and lower portion. if you changed your link or anything just tag me so I will update it ASAP.

also I am working on porting over to wordpress. I hate to have my posts deleted (heard that, blogger?). I should be officially unveiling it once I found a nice enough skin for it. currently its on restricted access lol.

think thats all the updates on the blog I have for now.

poly forum 2009 sub theme 4.
with the April 2009 semester out of the way, I will move on to the things that have been keeping me busy during the holidays.

the first would be the Polytechnic Forum 2009, which the school of BA sent me for from the 7th till 17th September this year.

there is also an opening ceremony on July 25th but I cant attend due to the ECD bazaar so lets skip that.

my initial impression of poly forum would be an extremely long event where we will do research on boring things (erosion of cultural identity! is this IAC or what?) with a free trip to JB on the second week.

in the end it is still a lot of boring research in the first week, but the second week was more interesting than expected.

the first week from 7th to 11th September is what they call the "Pre-Forum" week, where we collect information to collate during the JB stay.

there and four sub-themes (meaning they do research on different things, like recession, rich-poor divide, erosion of cultural identity etc). while most teams had excursions, site visits, talks and movie viewings lined up for them, poor subtheme 4 had to work within even smaller subgroups and think of where we want to visit to know more about cultural erosion.

the topic we had to start with is already so vague, but luckily we eventually worked it out and we decided to look at food and hawker fare and how young people dowan to take over or something like that.

so we interviewed older hawkers and patrons at Chinatown, Old Airport Road and some other places, while finding stalls that are not opened at some market around Shenton Way (no not Maxwell).

it is extremely IAC as we went around all these places filming people while interviewing them with questions that we came up with ourselves. and this continued from tuesday to thursday so you can imagine how tiring those few days were for us.

it is along this week that I met nice people from other polys whom I collaborated with over that week and the one after that. people like peijun, junwei, qing hui and farhan (unfortunately he moved to another working group in JB so didnt manage to stay in close contact).

friday was a collation day. for us we shared our findings at the LT18B assigned to us. its a little old and inaccessible I must say LOL. then came all the talk about us not moving in the right direction, looking at things only physically but not mentally and blahblah. then we are broken into working groups: presentation, multimedia, research and collaterals.

I am in collaterals together with quite a few of them. it turned out to be the group with the most people with the easiest but most tedious work. more discussions ensued on friday and we eventually decided to make paper cutouts of some traditional costumes, with one side for them to write what makes them singaporean and the other for them to keep as a bookmark. this ends the first week.

the second week is known as the "Residential Week" or something. we checked in at Pulai Springs Resort of JB. heard it is famous for its golf courses, but unfortunately golf courses are off limits for us.

we began work on the decorative boards on which we will hang the costume cutouts with the visitors' messages, which includes esplanade, chinatown shophouses and HDB flats. I have taken quite a few photos that I will show another time.

we also worked on cutting out all that costumes (all 500 of them) and on pasting the descriptions. that took most of monday and tuesday and a little of wednesday morning.

so by wednesday afternoon we had plenty of time to just slack around. but the slacking doesnt just start on wednesday. every night in Pulai Springs is an excitement.

monday night we met some of the people who are in our working group, namely titimah, meiqi, jezebelle and natalie. went over to their room with qing hui, junwei and peijun and watched teebee. criminal minds I think. forgot if they played any cards but probably didnt cos I think they slept early. see my memory is failing me so soon. so we just watched teebee and went back to our rooms.

at my room (is it 524? SHIT I FORGOT THE NUMBER) I talked to my dorm-mates for the next 3 days, darrell (he will be closer to us as the days go by), liqian, zhangkai, qing hui and... the alien dude (sorry!), chatted a while on MSN with melissa before sleeping.

the internet there can go suck my balls. there are 5 accounts per subtheme but not only is it slow, we keep getting disconnected because there is some limit on the number of users at once. some more internet access is sold at RM50 for 24 hours usage, which can only be shared by a few people. considering we are only back in our rooms at night it just isnt worth it. and so everyone had plenty of fun struggling to use whatever little bandwidth they could get.

second night they started playing card games proper, after watching Fated to Love You on Channel U of course. its like a daily rite of passage. they played some uno, then some dai dee, eventually they moved on to heart attack, but you have to copy the action of the person doing heart attack before putting your hands down.

at first it started with simple monkey faces but the actions got increasingly elaborate, with running around touching corners of the rooms, hitting people and spinning rounds. you can watch a video of it on my facebook, where I got hit. that happened on the 3rd day, where people like darrell, sean, dominic, zhangkai and his girlfriend had joined us.

it is one of the main games they play, and as usual I am being the audience and just watching along haha. they also played polar bear. it is a game too complicated to explain and I shall not bother, but its interesting enough.

thats how we spent most of the nights, with them playing games like these and me watching (lol). I did join towards the end la.

the 3rd day afternoon darrell and singya and I ventured out of Pulai Springs to the shopping centres nearby because its too boring. the rest of them went swimming I think.

we visited JUSCO of Taman Universiti and the shopping centre near it as well. forgot its name haha. its just pretty plain walking and looking around, and darrell stocking up hell a lot of groceries even though its the last day with my egging until he dulan at me LOL.

on the cab that we took on our way back, I noticed the meter isnt running (which is pretty common) so I simply asked him 5 ringgits? darrell heard it as 5 minutes. in the end the driver said something like errrrrrrrrrrr I try, looking very distressed. later on we realised that we sounded like we are threatening him by telling him to reach Pulai Springs in 5 minutes with 5 ringgits. oh well~

day 4 afternoon we were back in SP for the closing ceremony that will take place in the evening. its quite an uneventful time spent, just walking around and eating and a little bit of talking. didnt visit moberly in the end unfortunately.

closing ceremony was nothing special except for listening to (admittedly rather boring) presentations. the highlight is the dialogue with Minister for Community, Youth and Sports Vivian Balakrishnan (what a mouthful), where there is this EXTREMELY unhappy SP dude with all the ahtiongs cheap foreign labour influx and them taking away opportunities from us (it even appeared on the papers).

then later on an extremely PLP poly dude who rebutted what he said, saying there are still plenty of opportunities around the world and everything. drama.

since then I had an outing with the poly forum people, with a BBQ/chalet coming up soon! woot cant wait.

I intended to post about Leo Fusion actually, but its not over yet. so I think I will (hopefully) write about that when it ends this weekend.

class photo of TB22 Apr 09
in what I can only describe as an extremely-uncalled for hiatus, I am back again.

some of you may have realised it by now, but I am kinda losing steam in blogging often, one thing because a post takes a long time for me to write (this took 4 hours or so), and its not easy for me to take out an entire hour and just blog nowadays.

nevertheless, I will continue updating, albeit occassionally. not ready to shut this 6 year old thing down yet haha, though I may migrate to wordpress since blogger appears to be deleting my archives already.

the feeling of losing your old posts hurts. bloody blogger. they are like bits and pieces of my past. does wordpress delete old posts as well?

==

I promised to talk about the April 2009 Semester, and I will do so now.

the semester started out similar to the October 2008 one, where only junxiang, hup song and I managed to enter the same class again.

however, unlike at the end of Oct 08 where I made friends who I still remain in contact with now, April 09 did not return such a result.

don't get me wrong, April 09 isnt any less friendly than Oct 08. its just that April 09 sticks to their cliques a lot more, and there is a lot lesser interaction.

it is not something only I observed, even the ECD (entrepreneurship) tutor Liang Wee Kok said so, that we dont behave like a class.

could it be that the group did not attempt to include us like what simon and justin did? or is it our problem that we did not really try and interact with them as their clique is bigger?

I am treading on thin ice here, but this is a question that bugged me for the past semester. to be honest, I dont know the answer myself. my personal belief is that both sides did not make that leap, and this opportunity to know each other much better is wasted.

==

for the second part maybe we will talk about the modules.

CMA is Cost and Managerial Accounting. unlike POA, is really different from your conventional accounting, with a much greater focus on theory rather than accuracy of long calculations.

and thus there was some growing pains associated with it. it really took me a while to get used to how CMA was, with new theories that are pretty much unrelated coming up every other week while learning to apply the knowledge. this resulted in my poor showing for my CT2.

my determination to not screw CMA up made me work hard for the final exams, and thankfully the format of the finals are quite standard and I finally managed to make sense of the chapters, especially those on Cost-Volume-Profit Analysis.

FMGT too was quite a struggle, though not as much as CMA was. financial management had both theory and calculations. its the theory that was more troublesome. the theory is somehow related to one another, but it takes some effort and logic for you to see all of them in a bigger picture that will help you to appreciate it better.

the time value of money calculations though was a real problem for FMGT, since the questions varied year after year, much like your E Maths O Levels papers. the question somehow became more like a test of your understanding of english.

the FMGT video project was also fun. the video has to be 8-10 minutes long and so it was a different experience having to come up with a proper script and editing the entire length of it. also one of my group members had a nice room in his bungalow that let us filmed properly without all the surrounding noise so it was all quite smooth.

HRM was alright since it is very much like BMGT, OBSE and BLAW in the sense that it takes more memory work. however the content is somewhat deeper than the year 1 modules. the questions are also more application based (identify the job appraisal method in the case study and explain its function as opposed to explain the graphical scale rating system).

EBA (tech module) and ECD (entrepreneurship) should be discussed together, since their deadlines collide all the time. I remember vividly working like a dog for both proposals that are due on the same weekend and both requiring around 15-20 pages. in the end the quality of the reports were "split" between the two. now I know I dont work so well when multitasking lol.

the EBA online store project was quite a trouble for us as well, especially since we dont really have an idea of what to sell, and we are lazy to think of another thing to sell after having to sell things in ECD as well. some more we have to do an access database. thats why EBA isnt quite as enjoyable even with a good tutor.

the ECD bazaar was a good learning experience at doing my own business as well. it is my first go at running a stall, and we went with longkang fishing, thinking it would be easy money. turns out it wasnt quite as easy as we expected, probably since parents are watching how much they spend, and games for their kids are probably not the most important.

still, it was fun to source for fishes and its supplies, visiting places like Farmart Centre and Qian Hu multiple times, in the process learning more about rearing fishes. staying overnight at Kovan Hub was also really fun as the group spent time chatting and preparing. its probably one of the most unique memories I will ever have of my polytechnic days and I am really grateful for that. I am not sure if the rest of the group felt what I felt but I am really thankful for them for being with me throughout the process.

==

as for the tutors, I have to say they are all really nice for April 2009. probably except the CMA tutor whom I never really managed to chat with.

Mdm Jacqueline Fong struck me as being extremely nice of the entire lot. she goes through lecture slides and tutorials pretty immaculately, checking to ensure we did our work and shared quite a bit of her work experiences. in fact she lectures quite a few modules for year 3 HR as well, all of these very telling of her experience in the field of HR. she was also the one who kinda made me realise I have quite some interest in HR which I may consider pursuring.

Miss Lim Meng Keng is one of the lecturers for Financial Management and also my tutor. she probably has some experience, but I feel that she isnt as knowledgeable with the topics as what Jacqueline Fong had with HR. not to say that she is unqualified la, just that the depth and passion in the field seems different. but she is incredibly friendly as well, and one who likes to crack jokes. not the most funny but in a way she tries to connect with the students and did not fail that badly.

Mr Jonanthan Chan is the module leader, lecturer and tutor for EBA, a computing module. the things we learn in it are definitely not the most fun, especially the e-business thingy that involves setting up eBay stores and everything. however, he is a cool guy. he is probably the one I had the most non-academic related chats with, similarly because he knows quite a bit about news both technologically and non-technogically related and its interesting to exchange ideas with him.

Mr Yam Weng Wah is the module leader, lecturer and tutor (again) for CMA, an accounting module. he is kinda monotonous and thus its a little difficult to understand what exactly he is talking about. to be honest my interaction with him wasnt exactly great for that reason, thus I dont really have much to say about him. I feel bad but well, I have to say at least he made the effort to go through all tutorials and classwork properly, something that other CMA tutors may not have necessarily done.

finally, Mr Liang Wee Kok is the module leader, lecturer and tutor for ECD. he for one is one of the most easygoing tutors I have ever known. he gives plenty of hints for the final test, shares a lot of his information he garnered from his time as an entrepreneur and is generally quite relaxed about rules, such as formal wear during presentations. his lessons are relaxing to attend too.

to conclude, I would say that I am really lucky for April 09 since I met all the tutors who are either lecturers and/or module leaders, which meant they had some years of experience in both the field and in teaching behind them. this was probably why the entire learning experience was generally more pleasant for Apr 09 semester, helping me to achieve the results I had set out for.

==

and thats the April 2009 Semester in review.

now that the final paper of the final exam (lol) is well out of the way, a little thoughts on it.

this CMA paper is in a pretty standard format that is similar to past year papers. not that difficult, but takes the energy out of you with its tedious calculations in preparing all the reports.

I know by now I definitely made a mistake with the application of the overhead because I forgot to apply it to all 3 sections of the non-traceable cost. that should be about 2-3 marks.

then I should also lose an assortment of a few marks at each theory question because you never know if you hit the point.

I am just glad it isnt a disaster like MIEC was without enough time and everything.

will prepare my review post within the next few days.

sorry for boring posts about the exam. I still remember the term 2 post that I will prepare by next week.

in day 2 of the war that is the semesteral finals, a dramatic twist of fate ensued, with the offensive clearly on the side of the opposition.

the Financial Management paper raised the toll of casualties, mainly because of my scattered careless mistakes that took out 1-3 marks each.

of course, nothing could win the mother of all armies, the time value of money question at a staggering 17 marks. while there are four major parts to it which are only partially interconnected and gives you chance to prevent a snowballing of mistakes, answers range from 3000+, 1000+, 500+, 300+, 100+ and even a particular 9.63.

what is even more interesting about it is that because the answers are all so diverse, nobody knew if anybody got the correct answer! I only know of one person who has the same answer as me.

I estimate a score between low B to an A for this one for me, mainly because of the amount of extremely dumb careless mistakes (when I was reviewing the paper just now I felt like slapping myself) and the unidentifed object that is the time value of money.

the final battle will take place at the top of the hill (literally since its the exam hall at Block 53 Level 8) on friday, which I am the least confident about. shall put the relatively generous amounts of preparation time to good use..