3.65

That's my Cumulative Grade Point Average for my first semester at NIE, out of a maximum of 5.

Received A- (4.5) for Maths, and got C+ (2.5) for Physics I and Educational Psychology I. Got B (3.5) for all the other courses, except for Communication Skills, which I got B+ (4) for.

Homosexuality

A simple piece on why Homosexuality is Not Immoral by Peter Singer. I love the clarity of his writing in bringing out the absurdity of the "it's unnatural" argument for the immorality of homosexuality.

But we might just as well say that using artificial sweeteners is a "perversion of our sense of taste," which exists so that we can detect nourishing food. We should beware of equating "natural" with "good."

There are so many issues worth fighting for, but sadly it seems that much of humanity doesn't listen to reason.

Books

Received an email from the Princeton University Store on their holiday book specials, pretty interesting-sounding books.

Not to discredit the other authors, especially Paul, who I took a poetry seminar with, I highly recommend The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter by Peter Singer, co-authored with Jim Mason.

Actually, you could pop over here to read some of Singer's writings, there are articles like this one that discuss the Ethics of Eating.

Think about the issue. Food probably takes up one of the largest chunks of your spending, and as a consumer, you provide crucial financial support to the process of food appearing in front of you. Each day, with each meal, you are voting with your money. Do you vote with your conscience?

More Upheavals

Now that the holidays are here, the 3 other NIE tennis courts are undergoing renovation. Just happened that I had just blogged about how Tennis Court 1 had been renovated when I first started NIE.

Had quite a good tennis session today, played through a drizzle that thankfully passed, though it got a little too heavy for comfort at one point. Lots of people clamouring to use that one court today, good thing we had a booking.

I'm able to get some consistency on my first serve, but I feel that I'm not getting optimal power on it. Meanwhile, my backhand is not too bad, though pretty weak when I'm caught. At least I get the ball in consistently, and can go for the cross-court winner when given the chance. On the forehand side, I can access the cross-court angles pretty comfortably, but need lots more work on the inside-out forehand.

Hope it doesn't rain this evening! I think the last time we had Thursday tennis was probably a month ago!

Let me leave you with this photograph taken in Thailand.

Cute Things

Did you all know I have a nephew? He likes to eat bananas.
And he might be slightly tipsy in this photograph.Yet in this next photograph is someone far cuter!

GESL

Our group did our GESL project last week, which had dragon boat racing as the first activity. The weather held up throughout the 2 day 1 night camp, which was great. Very light drizzle as we were paddling.

The air that Kallang morning was slightly soggy, laden with a salty uncertainty. The smell of the sea, cold and churning with possibility. I know the sea and its horrible taste in the mouth, I know how it can make you free.On the second day we went to deliver food to some elderly living in flats in Toa Payoh, and cleaned a flat. I worked mostly in the kitchen, and found a bottle of rice vinegar that expired in 1988. I was 7 years old then.

This is NIE

It says library, but this is also the canteen. When you're hungry and have an assignment due in two hours, grab a bite at the canteen then rush up to find a computer in the library. See those trees in the centre? They shake with unholy fury at canteengoers during the vicious thunderstorms we've had this year.Tennis Court 1 in its renovated glory. It was made ready for play just as we were welcomed on campus in July 2006. There are 3 other courts behind, and down some stairs.
This is a view from Tennis Court 1. The buildings in NIE are pretty good warm-up grounds if you're thinking of taking part in a vertical marathon.
My trusty steed rests in the shade of the midday sun.

Toys

AM's friend's daughter celebrated her first birthday over the weekend. Here's a photo of her with some of her gifts.And my mum got me this from Hong Kong.
I think it will look perfect on my desk in the staff room, if I get a desk.

Another PS Clerk Wears The Ring

I am not sure if we are witnessing a trilogy of epic proportions here, but Bryan is third in a line of OPC PS Br NSFs to get married in recent history.

Photos tell the story... First, a little KTV with his understudy before the wedding dinner...In case it's not obvious, the groom is the only person looking at my camera. I suppose that would make him the only person looking to the side in the other photo!Where's Wally?
Wally certainly isn't in this picture, but Wally doesn't exactly know why. Perhaps because he ORD-ed quite long ago already?
That's all, folks!

Watery Visions

A few days ago I was in the toilet at Boon Lay MRT. There was something about the particular dinginess of the lighting inside, the particular stench of urine, the way the sinks were off-color, and probably the guy changing in the corner... when I stood at the urinal, music coming through my headphones, for a fleeting moment I thought I was in New York City...

Sports

The new stadium and sports centre next to our place is open! Went to take a look around the other day.A highlight of the place is the aquatic centre, which has a huge water slide. Great for the family.
Up on the roof there are two tennis courts. Good to know, though expensive to play.
Meanwhile, around the neighborhood... The MRT extension is taking shape...
And maybe one of these days I'll go try out the skate park near the PIE entrance...

Rain On My Parade

The rain has been horrible these days. It's made me miss at least 2 tennis sessions this past week, and in addition I also rescheduled my dental appointment because it was raining so hard.

It's made me feel pretty sluggish these few days. Probably combined with the fact that my classes are more or less done, and I don't really need to go to NIE anymore. Last class tomorrow.

But I got my fix of tennis this morning at NUS, and if nothing goes wrong with the weather, tennis tomorrow morning at NIE is on.

The NUS tennis courts are currently under renovation. They were supposed to be finished with the first 8 courts by mid November, and then work on the other 5 until the end of December. But they screwed up, citing some technical problems, and were actually thinking of renovating all courts until the end of the year! They finally decided not to renovate the last 5 courts for now. And the good news is that they are actually done with one of the courts, and they made it available for booking! So there are 6 courts to play with, one of which is spanking new!

Federer's record has been amazing...

Oh, and if it doesn't rain on Tuesday morning, will probably be doing dragonboat racing! We're having a camp for some kids as part of community service. And Bryan's wedding is on Tuesday night too.

Get Your Funk On

My Kogi L4AX-NA 14-inch LCD monitor (which is actually my wife's, bought from Best Buy in USA) pretty much gave up on me. No dead pixels, but the entire screen is white and washed out, can hardly see a thing. It actually started off by flickering quite badly, and in its final stage it was washed out and flickering. What I don't understand is that when i shut down my computer, the screen says NO INPUT SIGNAL in perfectly formed red capital letters, as if to mock me.

Had to use my laptop for a few days, my Toshiba Satellite 2800-S201 that just celebrated its 6th birthday several months ago. It received a new 20GB hard disk about 3 years ago, after the 6GB drive that it came with started crashing a little too often, and was running out of space. Couldn't afford for hard disk problems to plague my senior thesis!

Especially in comparison to my desktop, my laptop was horrendously slow at times, so 'twas a good thing that the monitor didn't die out on me much earlier, while I was desperately battling assignment after assignment. But generally it was quite ok, just that one time it was really crawling. Not sure why that happened.

I got a nice screenshot out of my laptop running Debian, though, which I themed to look like a Mac. Played around a little in both GNOME and KDE, but I prefer GNOME anyways, so the screenshot was taken in GNOME. Even got the "docker" on the bottom that zooms in under the cursor, and the icons bounce after being clicked.
I got a Dell E177FP from Sim Lim, S$255 is not bad for a 17-inch LCD monitor. Pretty much the cheapest reputable deal I could get. The 3 year warranty is not from Dell, though, but from the distributor. By the way, the response time of 8ms, quite typical of LCD monitors these days, is a full 42ms less than that of the kaput Kogi monitor!

I spent some time fiddling around with my system after the addition of the new monitor, and realized that the driver I was using for the integrated graphics card was sub-optimal (to put it mildly). Changing some options was as good as buying a new graphics card because the integrated card is actually quite powerful with a proper driver!

Basically what I did was change the graphics driver, set the desired resolution to 1280x1024@60Hz, and finally got power saving working (monitor switches off after 10 minutes of inactivity), which had me stumped for a long time, since I bought my desktop actually. It seems the generic 'vesa' driver I had been using was incapable of triggering DPMS to the monitor through the graphics card.

Spent some time playing LinCity-NG and TuxKart after that. It was also very fun to play Cannon Smash, a table tennis simulation. Still can't quite get used to Free Tennis, a tennis simulation.

Holidays

It's been about three weeks since I last posted. Happy Thanksgiving!

The busy period was supposed to be over in the end of October, but i guess it actually spilled over quite a bit. Can finally take quite a good breather now, last assignment was due on Monday.

My ambitious goal for the holidays is to do some programming, be it learning to develop code in C++, Java, Perl, etc., or perhaps even contributing to open source projects like Debian or Gnome.

There are some possibilities. One is developing a visual interface for GNU Robots, another might be learning to write dynamic web applications using the Google Web Toolkit. The Google thing seems rather appealing, since in many ways the web is becoming an operating system, with programs written for it. Everyone could use a proficient web designer.

Also thinking of perhaps generating lesson ideas for teaching physics and maths, and putting them up at those websites I've just created. In case anyone is interested, I've also put up rather amateurish videos of stuff burning: matches and cotton wool.

And I could continue reading what I was reading, or perhaps start writing again, for example, writing on this blog. But there will be a lot of writing next month, just a matter of what kind of writing.

I have lots more to write about here, but will conclude this post now. Need to publish. Cannot write and write without publishing. Otherwise I'll keep having to edit the time-sensitive content.

Anyone notice that I'm now using Blogger beta? The look of the site has changed slightly, and the interface I'm using now to write this is quite powerful. I can even upload photos seamlessly. And there are post labels. And I'm logging in to it with my Gmail account.

Happy Halloween

Class 95 is pretty big on Halloween.

Played tennis today, after a rather long hiatus. Going to play again tomorrow, and probably on Thursday too, which is the day after tomorrow.

Sadly, I still have some assignments to do...

Selamat Hari Raya Aidilfitri

It's a national holiday, and I was supposed to do work, but felt really tired for some reason. But no matter, it means I'm refreshed to do work now, after I'm done with this post.

Just wanted to let the good folk out there know that while my bicycle was parked at Boon Lay MRT, the gel seat-cover I got was stolen, along with the seat-cushion for the rear seat I installed. The problem is that both of those were removable by fingers with opposable thumbs.

Just need to get past this weekend and the early part of next week and I can coast back to a sweet, sweet schedule of tennis thrice a week...

Whoops

Smashed up an EZ-Link card reader when squeezing out of Bus 179 going home. It's quite sparse inside the hard plastic shell, not a whole lot of wires and circuitry.

Got 2.5 out of 5 in the recent quiz for maths class. In defense, I was first to finish because I wanted to go early to finish up an essay for another class that was due that day.

Bryan's wedding is coming up. Our GESL project is organizing a camp for Youth at Risk on the day of and the day after his wedding.

Now that he has an understudy and is working on the project we were working on before I left, he realizes how much better it is to be in my position than in Yinglan's. Better to work on projects and come up with initiatives, which can only bring glory if successful, than to work on critical, routine, everyday processes, which can only bring ruin when you eventually make mistakes.

As a teacher, the same problem exists when "teaching" is considered "routine", so wait until you become Principal and are able to come up with projects that are visible outside of the classroom. And yet teachers in the classroom make the most difference to students...

2 Weeks

It's been a pretty draining week. Rushing homework, though of course no huge major deadlines this week, just 6 of them circa 2 weeks from now.

Decided to start reading again, going to read Bruno Schulz's The Street of Crocodiles. This creates continuity, though I was not really conscious of it when I choose to pick this book out of my collection. The last book I read was Cynthia Ozick's The Messiah of Stockholm, which was structured around Schulz's lost, rumoured novel, The Messiah, acting as a MacGuffin of sorts.

Of course, all this ties in closely with my first semester in Princeton, where I took this Freshman Seminar on Literature and Memory, which was really great, wonderful professor, lots of great books, particularly several works of literature related to the Holocaust. Bruno Schulz was killed by a Nazi.

Anyway, stumbled upon my old Princeton homepage, archived by the Internet Archive WayBack Machine. So, I've uploaded it in its entirety in the state that I had it in when I stopped updating it. Just for fun. Maybe it can get more fully archived this time round.

Playing music on my computer now, which I used to do in Princeton. Those days were pretty nice. Does music help? I was feeling tired and a little down thinking about the work I have to do, but have stayed at the computer and been productive. That is, until I started writing this post, and went to read Wikipedia about MacGuffins and other plot devices.

For me, Wikipedia, and the Internet in general, actually, is like a Supermarket, black holes for my attention and time. So many things to see, so many things to read. One big reason I love Firefox for allowing me to bookmark all tabs. Of course I know as well as you do that a site is forgotten once bookmarked, but that's my security blanket against the terror of information loss and entropy.

I am pretty scared about losing information, though the fact that it's been ages since I've made a backup of my hard disk suggests otherwise. Speaking of which, I just copied and pasted this post into a text file. I've lost too many blog posts in failed uploads and browser crashes.

Was at the library today, trying to find a "scheme of work" in order to do the lesson plan assignment for maths. Didn't quite find what I was looking for, but ended up browsing texts on fun ways to teach maths, and reading several simple childrens' books. There was a Texan version of the Cinderella story, with Cinderella replaced by a cowboy, and the Prince was a rich girl.

I wonder when MOE is going to follow MINDEF and get rid of Microsoft Office. I'm probably the only person in NIE using Linux (other than NIE servers!), and might even be the only person in NIE who doesn't use MS Office, I think even those with MacOS buy MS Office for Mac... I also want Macromedia to support Shockwave for Linux.

For maths, there's The Geometer's Sketchpad, and for physics, there's Crocodile Physics, and both of these don't offer Linux versions... I haven't really looked around for equivalents, but for the time being that's not so critical.

Floorball training is suspended for the time being, and will resume on 6th December. That's good news, more time for me to do work. It's also damn tiring running around. More so yesterday, when I went for training right after 2 hours of tennis at NIE. I played pretty incredible tennis yesterday, was much more consistent that I consistently am. Groundstrokes, especially on the backhand side, were pretty reliable.

There's a floorball game this Saturday with Republic Polytechnic, I'm trying to decide if I should go. I guess since transport to and from RP is provided (from and back to NTU), it's not too much trouble. But still a good 3 hours at least, and more if you consider the recuperation time required (if I actually do play, of course).

Andy, who sprained his ankle while playing tennis with me the Sunday before last, will be joining us at tennis this Sunday. Speaking of which, I've got a new pair of New Balance tennis shoes, which are a size too big, but were on offer at $60 from SportsLink at Jurong Point. The tread pattern of my Wilson shoes was pretty much worn out, and I was slipping and sliding on the floorball court last week.

Got a new pair of frames for my sunglasses too. They're actually for spectacles, so they don't really wrap around, but they should be more hardy, and are cheaper to boot.

Patched up my wallet with red duct tape. Looks pretty cool. Drinking quite a lot of isotonic drinks recently, especially since I started playing tennis more than once a week. NUS vending machines have 100Plus and NIE vending machines have H-Two-O.

Hello, loyal readers! Royal leaders!

3 cents worth

It now costs me $0.65 to get to NIE and $0.87 to get back, a total of $0.03 more per round trip than it did last month.

Doesn't change the fact that I have an essay due today.

Virtual Tour

I've put up a virtual tour of our flat. Only lasts as long as I'm at NIE.

It costs me $0.64 to get to NIE and $0.85 to get back because Bus 179 performs a loop.

I have 2 short writeups due next week. More importantly, from the 25th of October to 2nd November, I have:

1. Physics assignment
2. Maths lesson plan, with background conceptualization
3. Research essay for Educational Psychology
4. Essay for the other Physics class. Essay comprises 90% of the grade.
5. "Student Centred Learning Package" (IT-based), with writeup
   
6. Physics lesson plan...

Help! I played tennis yesterday, playing later today, playing tomorrow evening as well.

"Passed" the floorball trials; from next week, there will be training on Tuesday evenings and Saturday mornings...

Which reminds me... work beckons!

Woe is Me

Just when I need to do some research... the online journals don't seem to work! And there is scheduled server downtime until just before my paper is due! Looks like I either need to physically go to the library, or find a creative way to access e-Journals...

The final floorball trials are in 6 hours' time. Watched Miami Vice (the movie) with Say Yang and Aaron just now. Oh, and my sunglasses frame has broken. This pair of lenses seems to have broken 2 pairs of frames already. Will try to survive on clip-ons.

Did I tell everybody that I've bought a new tennis racquet? The Volkl Tour 10 V-Engine Mid. It's definitely having an effect on my game. Gives me the control I always needed. Got it at $149 at the World of Sports in Jurong Point, which is now closed for renovations.

Since I really can't do any research online now... I had better sleep...

Slacker

I am such a slacker.

Exhausted quite a bit of midnight oil last night, burning some now again. Good thing I know where to get more of that stuff, because I'll be needing it quite a bit for the upcoming weeks.

I guess I'm practising just-in-time teaching. Or is it just-in-time learning.

A classmate thinks NIE isn't very useful because it's just theory, and the lecturers here don't teach us the way they are asking us to teach in school. An interesting "requirement" that teachers of teachers should teach in the way teachers of students are expected to.

Back to my essay now!

Fast and Furious

October is the mega-month of assignment due dates. September is a small taste of things to come. Already I am getting behind.

Seems like we should be getting worried about plastic in our food. Styrene mimics estrogen?

Actually read that article on a board outside a canteen in NTU. All the NTU canteens I know use disposable plates, bowls, utensils... The NIE canteen uses proper plates and bowls. Come to think of it, proper, but plastic nonetheless. The hard kind of plastic.

Anyway, that board makes for an interesting read, and is quite cool! There was a criticism that the former dean of students didn't do much, bragged about his achievements but didn't know what was really important to students.

Playing tennis at NUS in a few hours. There's actually a floorball match later, and there were openings for some of the "new" players to join the team, but I didn't get selected =(. But they lent me a stick and a ball, so I can practise at home. I think a critical skill is to control a bouncing ball.

Just installed a pull up bar in the bedroom doorway. No drilling involved, just the pressure of rubber against the door frame. Kinda scary, but so far it doesn't seem to have problems with my weight, so just have to be careful.

On Monday, group presentation: "teaching" the mathematical topic of triangles.

Lost the first match of the NTU Tennis Open 9-1. It's a one "set" format, first to reach 9 games. Didn't mind losing because my opponent was a really nice guy.

Update

Playing floorball at NTU, the almost-final cut for the team will be made in the coming weeks.

Playing my first match in the NTU Tennis Open tonight.

My bicycle is quite massively damaged now, the rear wheel is off its axle. So no wheels for the next few days until I get a new bike.

Homework is coming in fast and furious, need to really start working on my assignments. Using Google Calendar to remind myself of deadlines.

Generally speaking, I think in the steady state I'll be playing tennis 3 times a week: Tuesday at NIE, Thursday and Sunday at NUS. Floorball will be at least once a week, probably more when training proper begins.

Going to class now. The bus in the morning is crazy crowded, so I'd better get a move on.

Oh yes, this is a link to a series of videos on discrimination. As Say Yang mentioned, such "experiments" were only properly possible in the past. Extremely amazing stuff.

And I have an NIE homepage while I'm at NIE.

STA Intermediate II

Took part in the Intermediate tennis tournament, lost in the first round to a kid...

Anyway, there's another Intermediate tournament coming up, I think I'll give that another shot. Quite different being in a match situation, and hopefully I can get more practice in before that next tournament in end September.

NIE starts tomorrow, will attempt to cycle there. My official ORD is today! I am finally done. And it's my wife's birthday.

Have finally gotten down to recompiling my linux kernel, it's currently churning away on my other machine, hopefully it compiles correctly and boots and is able to connect to the Internet!

Ok, it seems to have the proper driver for my built-in ethernet card, but probably need to configure DHCP or something like that to actually get connected...

Till next time!

Project Joy

I just remembered that I took part in a haiku contest some time back, and went to google for it just now, and found out that I was the winner! I thought they were supposed to notify me by email, somehow I never got it.

Anyway,

The winning haiku will be printed on a postcard promoting Project Joy. The winner will also get the chance to present his/her haiku at a Project Joy concert.

In addition, the winner gets one pair of tickets to a Crossroads 2006 evening performance.

For posterity:

The winning entry is:

quiet spaces fill
the coat and shirtsleeves hanging
on the bamboo poles

- Darren Tan

Got a look at some of the reports from my OCS days. Quite interesting, reading about the times I didn't try hard enough to bash through the bush when charging the enemy, when I took my time and tread carefully over a drain.

And who could forget (though I did, until now) my "drinking water at FUP" incident. I remember we were at Tekong, and I suppose the section was getting ready to do fire-movement, and no one told me you're not supposed to drink water! Haha... it was a Hibbert moment (Hibbert the scared-to-die soldier in Journey's End, a play we read for GCE O-levels), you know, dry mouth, self-care.

Anyway, the one word I remember from OCS was pride. You had to have pride. Pride was the reason that was supposed to motivate you. And everything else becomes a privilege.

a change will do you good

Anyway, I have moved to our new flat already, and it's coming to about 4 weeks since. It's nice, need to do laundry and vacuum the floor now and then, but it's all good. If you're in the Boon Lay area and want to come see, let me know! The new bus interchange at Boon Lay is now in use.

The GIGABYTE motherboard I got seems to have a non-functional ethernet port. Linux cannot detect it, and I think the giveaway is that the light doesn't come on when the RJ45 cable is plugged in. I brought the computer back and they called and tried to tell me that the light only comes on after the OS and drivers are installed, but that cannot be because the light is supposed to come on even when the computer is in shutdown! It'll probably have to be replaced.

Have one more month to ORD. Then NIE starts immediately. NIE should be great. Will find some tennis enthusiasts and play there. Have about 6 days of leave to clear still. Took leave today to bring my computer in.

Say Yang has been updating his blog. I'm poking at mine to see if it can feel anything.

Pentium Dual-Core 3.0GHz

Dear All, I have bought a new desktop computer. In the process of setting it up now. Typing this from my laptop.

Hope everyone has been doing fine.

I got a new cell phone too, for "free", after renewing the contract with M1 (and getting a discount off the monthly subscription for a year!). It's a Samsung X650.

Need to rush for wedding dinner now!

Thanks for all the Fish

Teach a man to fish and he will sit in his boat all day.

Anyway, I got married last month, 18 Feb 2006, to be precise. It's been a long time since I last blogged. The word "blogged" already seems weird. There are some photos of the wedding.

I've been good, people ask how married life has been, it's been more or less the same. As great as usual. We went for our honeymoon in Thailand, that was fun. Have photos from the trip too (bought a CompactFlash card there), but those aren't online.

The contractors are flooring our new flat, it will be a few months before we move in. Still need to get furniture and move stuff.

It looks like I'll be getting an understudy soon. But maybe not. Declining birth rate, globalization, there will be fewer NSFs available in the future.

Work has been quite crazy in the office. Did a fair amount of coding today, pretty exciting stuff. Will have to look at it tomorrow to check that it works the way I want it to, after the dust has settled. Must make a conscious effort to progress on coding in OpenOffice.org. It's going quite ok, but according to the ORD counter, I have something like 89 days left.

We have a new Branch Head and a new Staff Officer. Pretty soon we'll be leaving too! Will probably have to write some documentation before I leave, but that's never fun...

Oh, and did I mention that we went wakeboarding with Say Yang that day? Quite fun. Quite a strain on the muscles too. Now trying to get back into the tennis schedule after the wedding, hopefully the steady state is 2 sessions a week (Saturday and Sunday).

Anybody out there reading this?