The 1998 Series (Part Three).

I spent quite a bit of time thinking about what theme I should be covering in this 1998 Series – it wasn’t easy because it was after all almost 15 years ago! When I was in JC, I was fairly actively involved in the Chinese Literary, Drama and Debate Society (CLDDS). There were many memories during the two years that I was involved, some good, some bad, but all worth cherishing.

In my first year, I was part of the props team for the society’s annual drama night. I couldn’t remember the contents of the dramas, how the props looked like, or how the night went… all I could remember was that it was very tiring! That aside, it also gave me the opportunity to really got to know some good mates. We worked together, we laughed together, and I guess that is where we all build friendship, no matter in which stage of our lives we were. I still have some of them on my Facebook, and if you are reading this and you know of people who are not on my FB yet, link us up please!

After the drama night, I decided that it would be fun to be an executive member of the society, so I decided to run for the elections, and luckily enough, I was appointed the treasurer of the society. For someone who’s never good in mathematics, that was a challenge! My first taste of really managing accounts was for the Mid-Autumn Festival celebrations, and I was so relieved at the end of the whole thing that we didn’t incur a loss!

In my second year, as a senior, my involvement in the drama night was an off-stage one – I was the treasurer of the event and boy, it was even scarier than the Mid-Autumn Festival. The drama night was a huge event, so imagine the amount of money that was involved! It became so complicated that I had to have someone help me through it, and luckily again, we didn’t incur a loss! For the second drama night, I could vaguely remember the stories, the people who were acting, and the props involved – probably because it was my second time being involved things were much clearer. And yes, I was an audience for the nights so I could really enjoy the dramas!

Towards the end of my term, we organized an overnight camp in which we gauged the potential and abilities of the new batch of executive committee members – exactly the same way that I was being casted in the committee – and I remembered that after the whole camp, the bunch of us seniors had quite a heated argument as to who should be the president, but I thought we chose the right person for the job ultimately. And yes, imagine the relief I had when I finally handed over the job of the treasurer!

The things I did with the friends from CLDDS definitely formed a huge part of my time in JC (I don’t always spend time falling in love with people, in case you’d never realized), but if you were to ask me for the one thing that I remember about CLDDS, I would have to say it’s our “Society Book” – the book was basically just a big notebook in which members could write whatever we wanted, and we would just leave the book in the study area which the college called “Oasis”. We were never worried about others reading the book because most of the time people can’t be bothered. Also, the study bench at the Oasis became our “Society Bench” in which we would always hang out before the flag raising ceremony and during the recess and lunch breaks. For me, my habit would be to head to the Society Bench before flag raising, and then during the lunch breaks, I would usually hang out with people from my class – it was difficult trying to balance the two groups of great friends!

To those who are in the picture below and have not added me on Facebook, please do so! I’d love to see all of you again!

This seems like the only picture that the group of us at CLDDS 98/99 took together – thanks to Vivian who uploaded this to Facebook last year! And yes, before you start laughing, I used to look like that in JC…

The 1998 Series (Part Two).

Sorry for missing for so long. Have been quite busy lately with work and sometimes I don’t even have time during lunch to pen my entries. And as usual, once I’m at home, writing on my journal isn’t too high on my daily to-do list. But tonight I somehow managed to gather some momentum, so I decided to continue on my 1998 series.

When I was in JC, one of my friends introduced me to J-Pop. He was a big fan of MAX, who earned their fame under Namie Amuro. Being ever so interested in learning something new, I decided to try listening to J-Pop and I must say that I was kinda hooked from the word go. During that period, I started out listening to MAX and Speed. But after a while, when I bought a compilation album from Nanase Aikawa, I changed my taste from J-Pop to J-Rock. It wasn’t difficult to make that switch, the poppy songs were kinda getting boring after a while (strange that I’m enjoying K-Pop so much now though)

ID by Aikawa Nanase – The album that changed my life!

After Aikawa Nanase, I got introduced to acts like Luna Sea, Glay, Mr. Children and B’z by my other friends and for a good while, I made sure that my Discman was always playing some J-Rock music. I think most of the time I was listening to Luna Sea and Glay though. Until now, I still think songs like “I for You” by Luna Sea, “However” by Glay and “今夜月の見える丘に” by B’z were real classics. And nowadays I would switch on my Winamp to play a few of those classics every once in a while.

Talking about Winamp – I was first introduced to this little application back in 1998. I think one of my classmates came over to my house and saw that I didn’t have that on my PC. He was saying how amazing that program was and how it was able to play near-CD quality songs. Even though I was studying computer science, I had no idea then because I used the Internet primarily for my football needs (I started my online days back in 1996 using a 33.6 modem). So he volunteered to install it for me, and also helped me download a few MP3’s for me to try. That changed my life. After that, I was always busy decoding and encoding my CDs into MP3’s, and using Winamp, I was able to listen to the songs easily on my PC. That was really fun – I still remembered I was always on the lookout of pretty Winamp skins to decorate the player. But after a while, I thought that the classic skin was probably the most effective one. Haha!

1998 was also the year when I laid my hands on “broadband” Internet – I managed to persuade my mum to fork out S$60 per month to subscribe to Singtel Magix – essentially an ADSL service. When I first started playing on Singtel Magix, I was really enjoying the fast speed that the 33.6K modem couldn’t give me. But the problem was, I only had 30 hours of access time per month (back in those days unlimited Internet access was something that we could only dream about), so I had to be really watchful of my access. But no matter how careful I was, I was always over the cap, which meant that I (or in reality, my mum) had to pay additional surcharges. Singtel Magix was my main access to the Internet until about a year and a half into my army life, and I must say that it served me well. After that, Singapore Cable Vision came up with this cable modem which was even faster. And I think that was when I cut my subscription of Magix and switched to the cable modem. When I looked back, ADSL at 128k was considered high speed, and now if I were to be given a connection at 128k, I would probably scream at a few people.

Singtel Magix – when 128k was considered “broadband”…

Studying in a JC meant that it was back to a co-ed school for me after 4 miserable years in a boys’ school. While I had my twice-weekly German lessons to so-call soothe the misery and get to be in the same class as girls, it just was different. Of course, being at that age, and being in an environment where you’ll see the opposite gender everyday, it was natural for me to develop crushes on people. I guess I’ll come to that in a later part. I mean, you know I would be writing that anyway, right?

The 1998 Series (Part One).

After “Reply 1997”, it seems that those old memories would keep rushing back, and I find myself stopping to think about those days, and I think it might be interesting for me (and hopefully for you too) to write a little about those days. As I have always said, my happiest studying days were that 2 years in junior college, and also that 4 and a half years in university. For my years in university, you can always refer back to the entries from 2002 to 2006. But I don’t think I’ve recorded my days in junior college, or pre-university / senior high, whatever you call it.

Those days in Singapore the system was kind of weird. You actually go through two rounds of exams – one from your own junior high, and one national exams. The junior high exams would determine if you get into a junior college (JC) for the first three months of the next academic year as the national exams results are not out until March. Luckily I did decent enough for both exams and was able to spend my two years of JC in the same college. Anyway that’s not the point. Who’s interested in education systems anyway?

In that first three months, we go to school wearing our own junior high school uniforms. My JC was one which was popular among many students, so there could easily be uniforms from 40 or 50 schools during that period. That was fine, what wasn’t was that because traditionally my junior high school had shorts as the uniform, so it was quite weird for us to still be wearing shorts even though we were senior high students. And for that reason, we often got mocked by those schools who sported trousers. I didn’t quite bother with the mockery because since Singapore was a hot place anyway, wearing shorts suited me fine – I guessed I never had any fashion sense then, and that hasn’t changed!

Anyway for that first three months, technology advancement meant that the school has lifted the ban on pagers – we could actually bring them to school (just like what you saw on Reply 1997). Practically everybody had one, and the most popular pager back then was this Motorola Memo Jazz:

(Picture source: http://cockenaden.multiply.com/journal/item/12)

It was an alphanumeric pager, which meant that alpha texts could be displayed on the pager. But I didn’t have this. Instead I had another Motorola pager which I couldn’t remember the model – though I am quite sure that it was just a numeric pager. In those days, carrying an alphanumeric pager was so much an “in” thing that you don’t want people to know that you “only” had a numeric pager.

Anyway during that period, I still vaguely remember an incident about the pager. There was actually this relief teacher,  a recent graduate from the same college, who was taking my class during one of the lab lessons (I think it was Physics) and my pager beeped. She turned and asked who had that pager, before telling us that “pagers were not allowed in the college”. Some brave soul suddenly popped up and said “but teacher, the school has recently announced that we can bring pagers to school”. Apparently the teacher didn’t know the rule, and I think it must have been embarrassing for her.

During that first three months, I was in the Science stream (which almost was like a default for most), and I was taking Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry and German. I took German in my junior high, so since my college offered German at senior high level, I thought it would make perfect sense to continue taking. That turned out to be a wrong decision because the teacher wasn’t exactly a good one (there was a period that I thought he actually faked his qualifications to get the job at my college), and I was actually losing interest in the language. So I stopped doing German after that three months. As for Chemistry, I didn’t know why I chose that because it had never been my favourite subject – I guess it must have been a case where there was a cute girl in my orientation group that was doing the same combination which attracted me to do Chemistry. Again, after three months I regretted the decision and decided to do something else. So after that three months, I changed my subject combination (and class as well) to Mathematics, Physics, Computing and Economics. Some people called it suicide to change two subjects – I called it challenge.

Anyway during that first three months I had an interesting bunch of classmates – I think I was one of the only 5 guys in the class! We had a very strict class tutor who which was also a catalyst for me to change class. I really thought that I could get away from this strict teacher after switching class after those three months – turned out that she became my English teacher instead for the remaining of the year. Tough luck.

There were still a lot to write about 1998, I’ll keep them for later – I think I’m going to enjoy writing this series!