Pkchukiss - Reality Wine

You can see the electronic bugs still hanging around, but the wraps are mostly off the new skin. It is almost due for a change in blog design anyway, so Singapore Polytechnic’s eLearning Week is as good as any a time to get it done.

I haven’t been really posting, because I was hunting around for a nice design to replace K2. K2 looks very cool and neat, but when you have a few million websites on the same template, it starts to reek of copycatting. The current design is derived from the Kubrick theme that WordPress comes default in, and I’ve added a really neat calendar to the side of each post. If you were hanging around a few moments earlier, you could see the results of me trying to tame the thing to align properly.

Now that’s done, everything is set!

Do you like this skin?

(Heck, I like this template so much that you are never going to change my mind even if you hate it to the core. Neverrrrrr!!!!!!!!! Neverrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!!!!! Nooooooo!)

Scribbled under:
General

You know what happens when you don’t get your meals on time? Or skipping breakfast, but binging on lunch or dinner?

Problems, I tell you! Stomach problems! Skipping breakfast can mean lower metabolism for the rest of the day, plus having your stomach nagging at you during lesson, right before lunch can make concentrating on lectures a worse task than doing the last kilometre on a 42 km marathon.

The same goes for blogging. Writing irregularly makes the entire experience seem patchy, with lots of nagging digging its beaks into the side of your brain - kind of like an itch that yearns to be scratched, yet feels painful when the fingernails hit the flesh.

Graphic description aside, things have been ramping up another notch. I have at least 4 projects due at around the same time within the next 2 to 3 weeks, and absolutely not much time to prance around like a mad-man. The good news is they are mostly pretty easily done, though my Operating Systems research report is getting me in a bind. If somebody would just tell me how to decipher a technical manual on pre-opensourced Solaris operating system, and I’d be on my way with the report.

Yet, sometimes that is just how it would be, isn’t it? There comes some strangely weird obstacle that we just can’t seem to get around, and we wail in anguish at the mess that we hand in; only to get the assignment back, and reading through the very words we write, things don’t seem as dire as they did in the adrenaline-filled days up till the deadline.

Projects aside, the school held a blood donation drive during the week, so I popped down to give some. Too bad that I couldn’t get my classmates to do the same - needles probably gave them as much the crawlies as it does to Badaunt

(My phone offers poor resolution pictures, but that’s my right arm after being poked)

Thank-you card for the blood donation, as well as supplements
(This was taken with my digital camera)

I won’t go in detail to describe the slightly grisly process, but I can assure you that other than the anaesthetic injection (that feels like an ant-bite), the entire procedure, especially the main catheter, is totally painless.  Of course, there’s the disorientation of having a needle stick into your arm, but once you get over that part, you could literally sleep through the whole thing.

Kudos to one of my female classmates, whom was one of the only other two people who had the courage to make a donation. It was her first time, and she got a little jittery at first,  but went through the whole thing, though she got a bumpy haemotoma when the nurse accidentally opened a second hole in the vessel with the needle.

There are so many things that we can invent to save lives, but I guess blood is just about one of the elusive few things that we simply can’t manufacture in China.

Long live humanitarians.

[tags]Blood Donation, HSA[/tags]

Scribbled under:
General

Ok, it’s really crazy for me to put this in a post, but just how do you post inside my tag board? Whenever I try to post something there, the whole thing just disappears, along with my post!

I’ll tear it down the moment I have time to spare, if I don’t tear out my hair first!

School has been quite a handful to me, though it isn’t as bad as JC times, the lessons were mostly easy to understand, since I have a pretty ok foundation in programming in general, so I ended up finishing all my practicals early, and having nothing to do for the rest of the lessons.

I tried typing wisecrack comments into my program codes (done!), turning on strict mode (done!), mentored my junior peers (done!) and pestered the teachers to show me some of their favourite tricks (done!).

Rather than bore myself to death, I decided to tax those brain cells by looking for ridiculous stuff to do with Visual Basic. Since I’m still at a pretty basic stage, I decided to try my hand at coding something to find prime numbers from 1 to 10000.

In case you had noticed, it is a nightmare for someone of my mathematics caliber to try to do this using mathematics. Rather, I put VB to the crunch, and set it off to do all the grunt work.

Public Class Prime_Numbers 

Private Sub btnShow_Click(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles btnShow.Click  

'Specifies starting point for our prime        Dim iCounter As Long = 1 

'Specify the last number in range to check for prime 

        Do While iCounter <= 10000 

Dim loopCounter As Long = 1     'Used to find prime numbers 

            Dim testCounter As Integer 

            Do While loopCounter <= iCounter 

                'Looping through numbers from 1 till our current number to check for all factors 

                Dim modResult As Long 

                modResult = iCounter Mod loopCounter 

                'If a multiple is found, found counter is incremented 

                If modResult = 0 Then 

                    testCounter += 1 

                End If 

                'Setting stage for next divisor to be tested as a potential multiple 

                loopCounter += 1 

            Loop 

loopCounter = 1 'Resetting our loopcounter for the next number to be tested 

If testCounter = 2 Then 

                'Prime numbers can only be divided by 1 and itself 

                'Thus there can only be 2 factors 

                TextBox1.Text += iCounter & vbCrLf 

            End If 

'Resetting our test counter back to 0 for the next number to be tested 

            testCounter = 0 

'Stage set for the next number to be tested 

            iCounter += 1 

        Loop 

    End Sub 

End Class

The program in action

Anyway, the last prime number in the range from 1 to 10,000 is actually 9973. Is there anyone who is interested in purchasing this neat little tool for their next math quiz, or are you such a math god that you do not even need a puny applet from a programming noob to help you dominate your opponents?

Scribbled under:
General