…

After yesterday I stopped being bitter – I think I’d rather use my time and energy to think about how to cook up a HYP report instead.

Went to dinner at Ang Mo Kio with some of the NCSH3 people – it was nice to catch up with them after such a long while. The crabs were nice, but the bill definitely wasn’t. To pay that kind of amount of money definitely was not something that I expected!

Came back home and realised that I might be getting a court charge letter. To say my mind went completely blank would be a blatant understatement.

What a way to end the day.

Data.

My worst fears were confirmed – the data I’ve collected in the experiment turned out to have no results. Thank you very much to those who came, couldn’t be bothered to do the experiment responsibly, and screwed my results up. No words can describe my heartfelt gratitude. Without you guys who came and basically gave me trash and get that $8, there would have been no chance for me to crack my brains and think of contingencies now, and endure probably yet another sleepless night. I really can’t thank you guys more. You know who you are. Touch your heart and ask yourselves if you really have made the effort to do the experiment in a responsible manner.

May retribution strike the whole god damn lot of you.

To those who came and really helped me with the experiment, I thank you guys for the time and effort made. It’s just a shame that there were more people who simply couldn’t be bothered and basically thought it was just a 20-minute stay in the lab that would earn them $8 at the end of the day.

Haze.

The haze today was pretty bad again.

This is the University Hall when there is no haze.

This is the University Hall when there is haze and the PSI is at 130.

I’m sure everyone can see a difference.

Anyway I went to school for my French lecture and tutorial – all 4 hours of it. As usual the lecture was a torture because of some punk in class. I was so irritated that I really wanted to shout at him. If you want to flaunt your French, move your ass off somewhere. Stop trying to impress the class cos nobody is even remotely impressed. If I were to say we are sick and tired of all that rubbish that you manage to churn out every Monday and Wednesday, I would have been saying the greatest understatement in history. I don’t like to beg people, but I really beg that you can just shut the f*** up and do us all a favour.

After my French classes I went over to the NUSSU Secretariat office to see some friends. It’s good to see them looking fine and doing OK.

Had a chat with Jeremiah at the NUSSU secretariat office, and subsequently with Cheryl at Munchie’s and it seemed inevitable that we would talked about student activities stuffs. Of course both Jeremiah and Cheryl are involved at the Union level while I’m more at the Club level, but at the end of the conversations (especially the one with Cheryl), I understand why people seem to enjoy doing all these stuffs at the Union level – it appeared to me as if that they do not really take “people appreciating my efforts” as something that they want to get out of at the end of the day. I may be wrong, but it did leave me to ponder about my faculty club.

I see people complaining about the club, complaining about the faculty, complaining about the atmosphere, etc etc. Sure, when you look at SOC it really may not be the most exciting place to be at. The workload, the studies, etc, are indeed something that are really heavy for us. But isn’t it the same case for everyone else in the university? I’m not going to believe that people from other faculties are not having a hard time with their workload and things like that. Just because someone is from Arts or BizAd that means their workload is not heavy? I’m having none of that.

So what’s the problem of us here at Computing? I dare not say I have a solid conclusion, but I would think it basically comes down to the following:

1. Ignorance – there are people who are really not aware of the existence of the club, let alone the things that the club does. You can’t blame them when all the club does sometimes to engage the student population is through emails which I understand a lot of people send it straight to trash.

2. Free-riding – It’s so typical of mankind, isn’t it? We all are born free-riders. We just want to take and never want to give. If the club managed to fight for the student lounge for us, we just take. But we can’t be bothered with the state of the lounge. When the lounge is dirty, we write big notes on the notice board and complain, but we can’t be bothered to take the initiative to help clean up the place. When the club managed to fight for opening of tutorial rooms for study periods, we just go and use. We can’t be bothered to help maintain the rooms nicely. We can’t be bothered with the rules. Why? Cos we are all free riders by nature. We only ask what we can take, but we never ask ourselves what we can give.

3. Can’t be bothered – You may say you have tried giving. But people are still not coming forward. My explanation is you can’t be bothered to approach the right people. Do you think the crowd we had at Rag Day this year happened by chance? If not for the effort of those seniors who asked and begged the freshmen to turn up on Rag Day, would we have such a big contingent? They could be bothered to try so hard to get people to come, so if you tell me you have tried and people are not coming forward, my response would be simply “you didn’t try harder”.

4. Always wanting to be appreciated – Yes, we are human beings. We like to be appreciated for the work we do. We always like people to praise us or give us a pat on the back and say we’ve done a good job. But hey, if being appreciated is the force to drive you through, I would say that you are sadly misguided. If we know that we are talking about a crowd that belonged to the first three categories above, we should know better that we won’t be appreciated for the things we do. If you do student activities, you should keep in mind that you cannot ask for people to appreciate your efforts. You should be doing things because you want to do it, and you feel that whatever you want to do would really make a difference to the lives of everyone.

5. It’s never my fault – When things don’t happen, it’s never my fault. It’s always somebody else’s fault that something screwed up. We are university students, we should learn to accept faults. We should be brave enough to admit things cock up because we did something wrong. A brave man is not someone who points fingers, but dare to admit mistakes when they commit them. Generally people are more willing to forgive people who admit their faults than those who point fingers around.

6. It’s useless in the past so I won’t do it again – Oh even I’m guilty of this. I kinda stayed away from club in my year 2 because of the bad experience I had in year 1 (it was more induced by one person – those who know me well would know the entire story). But nonetheless I came back. I came back because I thought there is something that me as a SOC student, can do for the rest of the student population. I just hate it when I hear people complaining that it was bad in the past so they don’t want to do it again. If it was bad in the past, why don’t you press on and do it better the next time round? Problems for the first time are lessons to be learned, and any smart and mature university student should find ways to tackle those problems, not run away from them and turn their backs against the faculty. Since when has NUS (or any other educational institutions for that matter) taught us to run away from problems when we encounter them?

7. No Action Talk Only – A lot of us are great NATO people. We talk big and promise a lot. We always say what we want to do, what we want to achieve, but it’s always just talk. We say “we planned a lot of things to be done for this this this and that that that” but in the end it’s all just plans. No solid action taken. But when something right does happen, we can’t wait to claim credit for it. I’m guilty of this too. But at least I try to really do something. And do take note, when all you do is NATO, people with eyes can see. If you have been just talking and talking and did nothing, people will know. People will know whether you are doing something, or just plain talking cock. For example, Tengjie did a great job this year for the float – and he definitely wasn’t one who just talked. And everyone knew that he has done a great job – he didn’t need to tell anyone that and all of us could see that.

OK this has been a long moaning post, and I’m sure a lot of people out there won’t agree with me. But as a year 5 student, I do believe that I’ve been around long enough to see all these things happening again and again and again. When people nowadays tell me all the reasons why they want to stay away, I just tell myself “oh no not the same reason again – give me something new”…

But something Cheryl said just now made a lot of sense – we Singaporeans just like to be associated with winning things. So I guess maybe when SOC start winning a lot of things that are to be won then we can start having the support of the people…

Hey but didn’t we win the Most Improved Collection Award for the Rag & Flag this year?

Data.

Spent the entire day consolidating the data from my 2 days of experiment. I’ve processed 137 of them, and I’m leaving the remaining 73 of them for tomorrow. If initial observations were to go by, I’ll have a very terrible time writing my report out of this set of data because:

1. Most of the data is not consistent at all (i.e. there is no trend that is observable).
2. A lot of people apparently do not know how to read instructions, despite being told to do so.
3. A lot of people were really not doing the experiment seriously. That is explained by a lot of rubbish answers that I have.
4. A lot of people really don’t think while filling up the experiment questionnaire. That is explained by a lot of self-contradictions within the responses they give.
5. A lot of people, when unsure of certain things, simply couldn’t be bothered to ask and just assume things.

To those of you who came and basically couldn’t be bothered about giving decent response about the experiment, you’d better start praying to whoever you pray to that you don’t have to do experiments or surveys like mine cos there will be people who will come round and screw all your results up. Remember, what goes around comes around.

Though I wonder why do I have to suffer such a fate when I always have been giving people decent responses when I participate in their research experiments and surveys. This world ain’t fair.

Getting fed up – I’m off to sleep.

NJC.

Went back to NJ today for their Open House and it was a really nice experience. The familiarity of the place, coupled with the unfamiliar faces of the juniors made the trip very interesting. On the one hand, I saw the buildings, the facilities and the scenery which I was so accustomed to for the two years of 1998 and 1999 (yes, JC was that long ago). But on the other hand, I saw all the students who are in the college which I know none of them. A lot of nostalgia went through my head as I walked around the college compound. I remembered the classes that I attended, the places I hanged around with my friends from both 98S12 and CLDDS (Oasis is still there!), the canteen, the field, everything. The memories of the past and the scenes of the present – what an interesting combination.

The TA block of tutorial rooms. We always referred this block as the TA block because all the rooms were labelled TA-something (like TA11, TA22)

The pond in the centre of the college compound. Never realised that there are fishes in the pond though.

The CLDDS notice board – now we have the whole board to the club!

I always tell people the I spent the best times of my study life in NUS. My 2 years in NJ would definitely be in the second place. The staircases, the field, the computer lab, the Oasis, the library, the canteen, the hall, the band room (I was never in the band, FYI)… all these were all bits and pieces of my NJ memories. And when I saw the councillors and house reps all ran to one spot with their hands held up high doing an NJ cheer, I almost had the urge to run in and join them!

My beloved National Junior College. Thank you for everything.

Sleep.

Th experiment today was OK. It felt good to have actually done everything myself and everything went smoothly. Now it’s just a matter of consolidating the data, analyzing them, and try to craft a report out of it.

After being so badly tormented for the past week, I think it’s OK for me to take a minor break – until tomorrow perhaps?

I need sleep. And I hope I can sleep well tonight.

Bonne nuit.

Experiment.

I felt slightly better this morning, but still not good enough – it’s the kind of day that if not because of something important I really wouldn’t have gone to school. Invigilated in the morning for the Applications of IS module, before rushing off for my HYP experiment. To my horror (actually I wasn’t even remotely surprised) that my project experiment is not even half as important as somebody else’s god-know-what-the-heck-it-is. And even the photocopying machine decided to play trick on me when I most need it. After printing for about 20 sets the whole thing decided to call it a day and refused to work on me. Because I wasn’t even supposed to be operating on that photocopier in the first place, I had no way to deal with it, so I decided to move on with my experiment without printing some of the things – I reckon I’ll sort them out after today’s experiments were done.

So the people came. Some came genuinely wanting to help, but may others were there just for the sake of the monetary reward as they were really just giving me rubbish data that I don’t even know I can use when I eventually write the report. When I looked at some of the results they gave me, I was like – don’t these people even have the basic pride? I felt that the money given to them could probably been put to better use.

I mean, think about it. If you are asking 300 people whether a brand of orange is sweet or not by asking them to test it out, 299 of them tell you it’s sweet without even trying to taste it, would you still think that that brand of orange is sweet? Now I’m paying that 299 of them and having them tell me that the orange is sweet, and they don’t even look at the thing whether it’s an apple or an orange. How sad can that be?

What was more demoralising was that during the entire period of experiment my supervisor couldn’t even be bothered to pop by or give me a call to check how everything was going. When my experiment was over and I went over to his office, he was long gone. Is my project really so unimportant to him? I tell you, I almost broke down at that point. I was really thinking – are all these work worth it? Is it really my fault that I’m conducting my experiment only in October, with one month left to the submission of my report?

I have another day of experiment to look forward to, and I really hope that those who come are going to co-operate with me. I’ve got a god-damn report to write. I’m not even concerned if I get a second upper class honours already – I just want to get a report churned out.

But one darn thing is for sure, because of this experience of my HYP, I will not do my postgrad in NUS. Not that I really would get to do it, but if I’m lucky enough, I will not do it in NUS. This is one bad experience too many.

Gone.

If yesterday was bad, today was worse. I felt like dying the entire day, coughing until my throat hurts. The nose kept on running, and I’m feeling hot and cold. I have reasons to believe that my plight is induced by the demon called the HYP.

Tomorrow will be the start of my experiments, I pray for everything to flow smoothly. I’ve already gotten a very crappy process in my HYP, I hope everyone could just be co-operative and not do my experiment sloppily. If the results turn out to be rubbish I will have a rough time writing my report too…

I think I might collapse soon.

Sick.

Hey hey. Getting sick for the second time in a month is no fun. All the late nights and lack of rest have made me to be very vulnerable and there we have it – I’m struck with the flu again…

Spent the whole morning doing the administrative stuffs for my HYP experiment, and then spent the entire afternoon in school trying to write my HYP report. Not much progress – I managed to write another 3 paragraphs after the entire afternoon of thinking and trying.

My head was really spinning on the bus when I was on my way back, and I think the walk from the interchange back home was the longest that I’ve ever walked! Came back home and my headache didn’t stop, and I even manage to be hit by a blocked nose, a bout of cough and a slight fever.

As much as I’m pretty sick, I still have to carry on doing my project. Now I’ve got about 138 respondents, and I’m still short of about 42 to hit my target of 180. And from this call for help, I realised a couple of things. While I won’t go to the extent and say what I realised, I think I’ll just say that I’m rather disappointed. Maybe I have to go to my knees to get my friends to come help me with this…

I’m seeing stars, and I think I’ll just finish up with whatever I have on hand and go to sleep now – if I can even fall asleep in the first place. Trying to sleep for the past few days was so difficult because the moment I hit the pillow all the things about the HYP start to run around in my mind, and that made me totally unable to sleep.

1 more month to endure for my HYP. I’m not even concerned if I would get my second uppers honours now – I just want to get this damn thing over and done with.

French.

Went for my French lecture today and I think it would be a blatant understatement if I were to say that it was frustrating. It wasn’t as if that I couldn’t understand anything, but it was just how some people were behaving that made me feel horribly irritated. Like I was telling someone in class, I’ve already stopped looking forward to attending my French lectures.

I’ve got about 87 people who have registered for my HYP experiment, and I’m short of about another 100. So for those of you who happened to be free between 1pm to 6pm on Thursday or 10am to 6pm on Friday, please help me by coming for my HYP experiment! I need all the help that I need to make sure that I have things to write for my HYP report! The following is the experiment information:

Date/Time: 12 Oct (1pm – 6pm) or 13 Oct (10am – 12pm & 1pm – 6pm)
Venue: Programming Lab 4 in S15 Level 2
Experiment Theme: Online Referral Program
You will be given a token of appreciation of $8 for the study!

If you need more information or have any questions to ask, please send me an email to tangkinc [at] comp [dot] nus [dot] edu [dot] sg.

I need your help… Orz…