Haze.

Just thought that I’ll slip a quick entry before I go to sleep.

The haze that has been bothering for the past couple of days kinda went away today. It was really bad yesterday when the PSI hit 150, and the air was full of that burning smell. The worst thing was perhaps to be able to smell it even when I’m at home. Now my throat feels dry and irritated. All thanks to the forest fire.

Spent today working again, though I couldn’t really continue on with my HYP report because I couldn’t seem to access the digital library from home. Maybe I’ll just stay in school after my classes are over tomorrow to see how much stuffs I’m going to be able to get out from the digital library. What to do, I’ve got a HYP report that require me to do lots of citations.

See you guys around.

World Trade Center.

Went to watch “World Trade Center” this morning at West Mall. The movie was OK, and it was not what I expected it to be. I kinda expected it to be those kind of film where you would associate the big American ego with the tragic event, but instead it was something more of the struggle to survive for the people associated with the event, how they tried their very best to stay alive. The thing that struck me about the movie was perhaps that people’s will to live sometimes can be pretty amazing. It was a refreshing break from those 911-related films where they tried to mock the American government. I like the fact that the film was trying to focus on the people who were in the centre of everything when it happened. It’s worth catching – it wasn’t exactly a breathtaking film, but it was still very intriguing and engaging.

Now waiting for “The Departed” next week. They all said Martin Scorsese made a real great movie out from the script of “The Infernal Affairs”, and that certainly sounds very exciting.

ZQJ.

Yeap, today’s ZQJ, which is Zhong Qiu Jie, which is Mid-Autumn Festival. The moon was really bright and big tonight. Nice.

Anyway I was in school today for a CISAA talk by Roger Lim, a SOC (or DISCS as it was then known as) alumni who is the founder and president of his own company Webvisions. I first (and last) met Roger in Shanghai during one of those SSBA Forums and it was nice to hear from him today about being an entrepreneur. He said the four most important things about being an entrepreneur, besides all those that they keep on harping about, were integrity, vision, loving what you do and understanding customer needs. I think that was really very true. Sometimes I guess when people say that you need things like passion and commitment to be an entrepreneur, it may not necessarily be a complete picture. I think the part about understanding customer needs was really essential, cos I think without that, you can have all the commitment and passion in the world and you still can’t get your business on the track because no one would come to you! There were also a lot of other pointers to take back at the end of the talk, and some of them were really things that sometimes we may miss out as we surge forward to try to become entrepreneurs. One of them is “you can take an old idea, repackage it, and sell it as something new” as companies like BreadTalk and Kopitiam are doing exactly those things. What’s so new about selling bread and running a coffee shop? It’s more about packaging an old idea to make it attractive. Sounds simple, but I think that’s damn true. Now maybe I can start thinking about how to package my raw business idea into something attractive. Haha.

After the talk I went over to SRC to watch the netball girls take on SDE – and we came away as winners! It was nice to see the girls playing with more possession and confidence, though I do have some reservations about the referees. I mean, I appreciate that they were really playing fair and going by the book, but to two teams of relative non-players was there really a need to be so strict with some of the calls? I think it ended up only frustrating both teams and made the game to be totally chopped. It was like every 20 seconds there will be a whistle call, and the game was totally not flowing – which probably also explained why the game was such a low-scoring one. But because one of the referees appeared to be pretty cute I’m going to forgive them for that. Haha.

Weekend. Probably means more work for me – though I still want to catch a movie one of these days. Everyone have fun for your weekend!

Busy.

My day of lessons started at 11 and ended at 8, and the best thing about today was I have a grand total of one hour of break in between. Fascinating, eh? In the morning as usual I was conducting my tutorials for my 2 classes of nice guys and nice girls, and then I have an hour’s break for my lunch. After that my lecture started at 2, and for 2 hours I was forced to keep myself fully attentive for simple things made horribly difficult by my lecturer. Once my lecture was over, I have to rush for tutorial classes again, because I was covering Sathish’s class for today. So for another 2 hours I was sitting inside a tutorial room again. Once those tutorials were done, I made a mad dash across campus to Arts for my French lecture. And when everything was done, it was 8pm. Wow.

Went to the SRC to watch the Computing girls play their inter-faculty netball game against Law Faculty. Even though the girls from Law were touted to be unbeatable, our girls from Computing managed to put three points past them! No small feat considering that the Law girls have managed to shut out a few other teams before us! So we should be proud of the girls from SOC! Anyway they will be having another match this Friday, so for those of you who can play netball, volunteer to join the team! And for those who can’t play netball, be there to support them!

Need to go sleep now – sleeping at 3 this morning is hardly the best way to prepare for such a long day.

Monday.

School today was OK, just that I was constantly tearing my hair out during my French lecture. I think at the rate of going, I’ll probably be bald before the semester ends.

The French oral test was actually pretty simple. It wasn’t like I got asked a lot of killer questions, and I think I managed pretty well. But no, I’m not regretting my decision to put my French on S/U because I really think my focus should be on my other module, as well as that dreaded HYP.

Went over to the NOC office to look for Hui Min and she reminded me of one fact – I’m getting out of NUS in less than 2 months’ time, so I probably would just need to hold on. I appreciate that reminder, but when my HYP seems to be getting nowhere it’s not exactly that comfortable a thought that I’m leaving NUS soon, especially when I’m due to hand in my HYP on 13 November.

Did some looking through of recruitment advertisements online just now and I saw a few jobs that looked pretty interesting and attractive to me. Maybe I’l really prepare my resume for these jobs before these advertisements get taken off. So that means I have more things to do for tomorrow.

Haven’t really recovered from the lack of mood, so apart from preparing for my IT1003 tutorial classes I didn’t really do much. Not that I’m exactly lazing around except spending about one and a half hours playing on my PS2. I can’t remember when the last time I played a game at home was.

Feel like watching a few movies in these couple of weeks. Now all I need is a kaki to watch with me.

Mood.

After coming back to Singapore for two days all I can say is that I’m not really feeling that awfully well. It’s like I suddenly seem to lose interest in everything in Singapore. I don’t feel like doing my assignments, I don’t feel like working on my HYP, I don’t feel like preparing for my resume… I just don’t feel like doing anything at all. I don’t understand why too, but it seemed like I get this kind of mood swings every time I return to Singapore from Hong Kong. Perhaps that’s a signal.

Nonetheless I’ve completed my E-Commerce Business Model assignment, and now I need to start working on the online version for my HYP experiment. The HYP is another source of my frustration. I hate it when I don’t seem to see any directions at all, even though it seemed that I’ve met my supervisor quite a lot of times. Sometimes I guess I have to take matters into my own hands and do things on my own.

School tomorrow – and to be honest I have absolutely no mood whatsoever to go for it. And please, I don’t need anyone pissing me off again tomorrow, though I don’t think that’s ever going to be likely. I’ve put my French on S/U today, mainly because I couldn’t be bothered with the course any more. I simply cannot stand both the lecture and tutorial groups that I’ve been assigned to. I mean, true there are some nice people here and there, but overall I just don’t enjoy learning the language even though I seem to be good at it. Maybe it’s the ego, or maybe it’s just some people.

2 more months and I’ll be leaving NUS for good. Even if I were to be doing a postgraduate course, NUS will be the last place that I want to do it at. I mean, 4 and a half years of memories at NUS was great, but if you take away the good memories, what remained would be just frustrations after frustrations. Make no mistake, I like NUS and probably would want to get involved with the Alumni in one way or another, but as far as studying is concerned, I think I’m pretty done at NUS.

Or maybe I should say I’m quite done with Singapore as a whole.