Now, just what game plan might pkchukiss be using to get that result in the first semester?

It is actually something deceptively easy – in fact, you might even think that it is no secret. But the fact remains that my game plan is my ticket to winning the first semester.

Study.

Now before you fall to the ground with your legs crooked up in the air, let me qualify that word by saying that “Study” doesn’t mean that you take the material and stare at it for hours on end. (I used to do that though, but since it is super ineffective, I thought that I might as well try something new.)

Studying smart is not something new. The techniques have mostly been discovered and employed by test-smart people all over the world for many generations. It’s just that you might not know the best way to get around to it that may be responsible for an average result in the examinations.

#1: Know what you don’t know

The basics of learning is to make a list of what you need to know, but do not yet know. This allows you to massage your weak areas, instead of spending time cooking the over-done parts, which you already do know. Usually, you can make this list immediately after class, though sometimes it could take a quiz or a mid-semester test to give you the rude awakening. The point is to get help for your weak areas immediately! I dare say that you need to treat it like an emergency situation, if not for your end of semester test, at least so that you won’t become lost when the lecturer goes on to material that builds on what you are already having trouble with!

#2: Stuff it in your head

Once you understand the material on hand, you only need to commit it into your long-term storage memory (a.k.a. non-volatile memory) for reproduction during the examination. Now, just how do you remember all those facts and figures for the end of semester test that seems so far away from now? The trick is to treat your brain like a RAM – where electric charge is applied frequently so that the information is not lost. Similarly, read up on the material you are supposed to remember on a consistent basis, so that the image will be burnt into your brain, like how a plasma television can get ghosty images permanently burnt-in if an image is left stagnant there for a long time.

The timeline goes like this: read the material (don’t even make a conscious effort to remember it) once after the lesson, and again for another time when you go home. Read it again at the end of the week, and another time while you are doing your tutorials. Once more on the month anniversary of that lesson. This should be enough for your brain to absorb the material for the long run. All it takes now is for you to read through the material the night before the test, and you’re good to go for the examinations. Note that if you do not understand the information at all, you need to take a look at #1 above. You must understand the content before this will work.

If the test is more than 6 months away, be sure to take out the content and go through it at least once at the 6 month mark.

You’ll notice that the time between revisions gets longer over time – that is because your mind is being trained to retain that piece of information for longer periods of time. Usually, if you ever get past the one year anniversary, that particular chapter would remain with you for almost the rest of your school life.

#3: Hard facts

You see, there are always these little things that your teacher forces you to memorise. Things like the date when Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles landed on Singapore, the name of the nuclear bomb that ended World War II, 250 word-meaning combinations for the school spelling quiz, part model numbers and other bits and pieces lying around.

Those things can get really annoying – I can attest to that. Worse still, your teacher refuses to tell you the significance behind that nugget of information, or you get kidnapped by aliens, and you need to be able to describe to the police the details of the place you were kept in (aliens seem to like dumping humans after taking them hostages).

For these hard facts and more, use mnemonics.

How do you remember the 9 planets that revolve around the Sun?
Mercury
Venus
Earth
Mars
Jupiter
Saturn
Uranus
Neptune
Pluto

If you had only one minute to memorise this, and be tested on it 3 hours later, what are the chances that you would remember it from pure memory? Remember #2 shows that you can eventually memorise anything you understand – if you see the material at suitable intervals. The answer would be this:

My
Very
Energetic
Mother
Just
Served
Us
Naughty
Pudding

A mnemonic that is memorable, and preferably outrageous (how can puddings be naughty?) will provide you the shocking effect needed to make an impact on memorising hard facts. Let’s try another one:

Group 8 of the periodic table consists of elements that are stable, and generally unreactive:
Helium
Neon
Argon
Krypton
Xenon
Radon

Try this for a fit:
Horny
Neo
Asks
Keanu Reeves
Xena’s (The warrior princess)
Rack size

It even works for numbers too:
Date of modern Singapore’s founding, 6 February 1819

6 Fabulous (Feb) pigs ate 18 cabbages, and 19 carrots. Raffles saw them, and puked violently on the Temenggong right before he found Singapore.

There. Memorising something isn’t that hard now, is it?

This post originates from Pkchukiss - Reality Wine. Read it on the original site:

Memorising something from a GPA 4.0

The good news is, not only can Wordpress do this, Blogger writers can do it too!

Wordpress:

It is a little more complicated for Wordpress users, since you have to do some initial configuration for your blog. In addition to that, you need to have a completely empty and private email address with POP3 access. Chances are, if you have an email address that you check via Outlook, Thunderbird or some other mail application, your email has POP3 access.

Check with your provider to see if he/they can provide you with another account with access. (It may cost you a little bit of money for certain providers) If they can’t, you can search the web for the many free POP3 email providers. I found BlueBottle via a directory, but I can’t vouch for that service since I have not used it before.

When signing up for that new email account, make sure you choose a very obscure alias, like “randomefullofnothing892734234@sgblogging.com” or something like that. This is to make the address hard to guess so that you reduce the chance of having Viagra emails published on your reputable blog. Once you have chosen the address, keep it very secret, and never give it out to anybody else.

Once your POP3 enabled email address is set up, go in to your Wordpress installation, and select “Options” > “Writing”.

Under the header “Post via e-mail”, you can see a few blanks listed:

Enter your POP3 account details into the fields shown, and then select “Update Options”.

Once this is done, Wordpress will start checking that email address every few minutes for any new email that is sent to your email address. Once finds an email, it will take the contents of that email, and paste it right into your blog. All you need to write your new entry, is to enter it into the body of your email, and enter a subject (which will be used for your new post subject), and send it to that email address (randomefullofnothing892734234@sgblogging.com if we follow the example above).

Simple?

Blogger

Blogger is more popular with bloggers. That is why Blogger has a similar feature. The good news is that the entire process is a whole lot simpler.

You just need to pick out a random word/phrase to complete the email address listed above. The completed address will be your secret email address that Blogger will check every few minutes for new email to post to your blog.

From there, send an email from any email address to the completed secret email address. Within a few minutes, your new email is posted onto your blog!

To use it

If your mobile phone contains an email application, you might be able to use it to compose an email. Otherwise, for most newer phones (introduced after 2005), if it has MMS capabilities, you can blog your pictures and sounds by sending the MMS to the secret email address that you have created above. Otherwise, you can also use a Blackberry to send a plain email, or hit the computer terminals at the Internet cafe (we call them LAN shops in Singapore) to send your email from there.

Stuff to look out for

Spammers are always looking out for email address to spam. Be very careful to keep your secret email address private (do not use it to sign up for all kinds of promotions, etc.) to prevent spam emails from being posted onto your blog. You don’t want some organ enlargement advertisements to appear on your blog, do you?

With the ability to write from anywhere (even Blackberries can blog now!) you need to be aware that whatever you write will be published immediately. This is not like in your blogging system where you get to save your rants as draft, and delete them as soon as the anger fit is over. In Singapore, you can get sued senseless (and penniless) if you are not careful. So, think very carefully if you really want to post that angry post.

Otherwise, you are good to go! Enjoy blogging on the go!

[tags]Wordpress, Blogger, tips and tricks[/tags]

This post originates from Pkchukiss - Reality Wine. Read it on the original site:

The little geeky things: Wordpress

The beauty about this process is that you can get all these done all with the power of sending ten digits over the Internet.

Ingredients:

• 1 piece of plastic with 10 numbers on the front called a “debit/credit card”.
• Various pieces of hardware, which when connected together form a collective existence. Commonly known as the “Computer”.
• 1 active Internet connection.
• 2 Panadol tablets.
• 1 glass of water to swallow the tablets.
• (optional) an open window to hurl item 2 out of when you find out things don’t work.

First, make sure that you are really serious about getting a website with its own domain name. You see, there are many websites out there that offer free web hosting, and give you a free subdomain, all without cost on your part. If you are getting your own domain name, it costs around US$9 per year for most registrars, therefore it pays to think carefully.

Registrar and web host explained:

A registrar is the company that you go to when you wish to purchase your own dot com. They will raise the request into their server that essentially tells computers over the world to “look for me if you want to find the server for ‘xxx.com’ (assuming that you registered ‘xxx.com’). Your registrar server will then point all computers looking for your domain name to the actual server on your web host that would serve up your web pages.

You web host is the company that rents space on its server for you to put all your pages.

Your web host might be your registrar, but it could be two seperate companies.

If you look around, you can find free web hosts that accept hosting domain names. Once you register your domain name, ask the registrar to point its servers to a specific machine name that your web host supply. Set the timer for 24 hours (you may wish to go to sleep while this happens), and wake up to find your website live.

This post originates from Pkchukiss - Reality Wine. Read it on the original site:

Getting your own dot com: Registrars and web hosts

Up till this point, I have been calling up the advertisers in the classified advertisements almost everyday, and do land interviews, but curious enough, there is always somebody who manages to land an earlier interview time, and gets chosen, even before I leave my house. For your consideration, I usually call around 8am, when most fixed line phones advertised usually go unanswered, so I am quite sure that being an early caller helps, but it gets annoying when the interviewer calls to cancel later in the morning after all the meetings have been lined up, and I suddenly find myself with enough free time to have trouble killing it, yet insufficient to go home.

(I always end up in the arcade shops, but don’t spend during these times. It sounds ridiculous to be spending money while seeking to earn some, so I just watched the other patrons play.)

Then there are those mysterious advertisements that promise high-earnings, and a “passive income”. I came off the phone from them extremely disatisfied. The person on the other side of the line refused to state explicitly whether they were SLM/MLM when I asked them so, yet insisted that I go down to visit the company for myself. Discounting that interviews are the norm for all jobs, their responses were highly suspicious: MLM companies try not to reveal that fact over the phone, but instead persuade people to go down to the company, so that the salesperson may apply their deceptive techniques to get the victim to join in.

When they called me back a few more times, I refused to answer my phone. Thank goodness for caller-identification! Which interviewer would persist in calling potential candidates who have not even gone through an interview, if they were not either desperate, or MLM?

I got quite annoyed, so herein lies tips and tricks to look for a temporary job without getting accosted by MLM companies.

The Call: It is easy for them to get your phone number, unless you have subscribed to line non-identification. You could either buy a pre-paid mobile card, or use the services of a call-back operator (if your incoming calls are free). These operators work by first calling your phone, and then calling your target number, and linking both of you up. When you use the service, the person receiving your call will only see the number of the calling system. Now MLM marketers can no longer do their follow-ups.

For cell phones, call around 8am, fixed line phones from 8.30 – 9am onwards. If you call around 10am, you are on your own.

Taking down details: It is tough enough to land an interview, but you usually need to know some vital details about the job, since the advertisements in the newspapers usually do not mention the nature of the job, and the commitment required. Having a pen and paper with you while you make the call not only makes it easy for you to write things down, it also impresses upon the callee your enthusiasm and readiness by taking down notes. Find out:

• The callee’s name and contact number. You would want to call her if you lose your way when travelling to the interview location.
• The name of the company. You will need to look up details on the company prior to the interview, so that you can impress the interviewer with knowledge of what he already knows.
• The address. Even if you know how to get there, don’t mention this to the callee. It gives you a convenient excuse in the event that you somehow get held up somewhere, and was not able to turn up for your interview on time.
• The nature of the job: Details about what you would be expected to do, and the commitments required. This helps avoid wasting both of your time if you know that you cannot cope with a 7-day work week. It also gives the impression that you are curious and excited about the opportunity.
• Dress code: You don’t want to be over-dressed or under-dressed. It is less deadly to be over-dressed, but if you are wearing t-shirts and jeans to an interview for office work, you are bound to look indifferent. Wearing will immediately blend you into the working environment right away, making you look even more suitable for the job.
• The time. Obvious enough.
• Do not discuss about the potential salary. It puts you in the league as other job seekers as predictable and shallow. You don’t want to look as if you are looking for a job for the money (even though you really are).

Your File: Using a file to hold all your important certificates, resumes and testimonials will keep it in its crisp and mint condition (you did keep it that way, did you?), and impress upon the interviewer that you are neat and keep your things tidy. (It won’t matter to mess your desk up after you get the job; you have already been hired!)

I know that taking advice from somebody who hasn’t landed a job himself sounds weird, but you have got to admit: these tips do make sense, and you really need all the edge you can get, given that I am also in the game!

[tags]job hunting, job interviews, part-time jobs[/tags]

This post originates from Pkchukiss - Reality Wine. Read it on the original site:

Tips to hunting a Part-time job that isn’t MLM

Update: (28 May 2009) Since the server shift in end March 2009, a few images were broken. I’ll post up the source files when I come across them. It’s somewhere on my hard disk.

To upkeep the massive bandwidth, RapidShare offers downloaders the opportunity to sign up for a premium account, which boasts:

• faster downloads than free users
• support for multiple simultaneous downloads, meaning that premium users get the ability to download many files hosted on RapidShare simultaneously
• a maximum of 3 GB limit on file downloads per day, which could be rolled over daily to a maximum of 10 GB
• resumable downloads

To encourage free downloaders to upgrade to a premium account, RapidShare includes a ticketing system that forces the user to wait about 30 seconds before being served the file, tallies up the total amount of data transferred, and enforces bandwidth limits.

By right, this is reasonable, and works perfectly for most free downloaders. However, because ISPs in Singapore employ compulsory transparent proxies, everyone’s requests for all the files are being sent to RapidShare via the proxies, which gladly registers the downloads. The trouble is:

• only one user out of all the customers connected to one proxy server is able to download from RapidShare at the same time, because RapidShare’s system allows each computer to download only one file at a time
• many customers share the bandwidth limit of that one proxy, which could mean that only a few people actually get their files per day. The rest go home and eat grass (empty handed)

With all that disadvantage, I was surprised that Singaporeans still continue to use RapidShare to share their files, when alternatives like:

• ImageShack (Images only)
• FileFactory
• FilesXfer (Update: FilesXfer is now gone)
• RapidUpload
• SaveFile

does the same job that RapidShare does, with a lot less fuss, and no problems interacting with the transparent proxy server that Singapore ISPs are forced (by law) to employ on all traffic.

Since the choice of file host is done by the uploaders, the downloaders are left with no choice but to deal with the frustrations of RapidShare and the ISP’s transparent proxies. Therefore, seeing the need for something to enable people to download files from RapidShare, I am going to fill that need.

The ingredients you need for this are:

• a web host (doesn’t matter whether it is your free host, or your expensive dedicated server) that supports CGI scripts. You could hunt around in the feature descriptions for all the hosts. For this, you would be looking out for “PERL”, “CGI-BIN” support, or something similar.
• an FTP program (any one would do)
• a browser (that thing you are using to read this page right now)
• A free proxy script (I use CGIProxy)
• A reasonable knowledge about your web host (chances are if you have gotten a web host, you already know enough)

First, you open your FTP client, and connect to your web host.

Then, find the directory that says CGI-BIN, and enter that directory.

Upload CGIProxy (if you have some other proxy script, you may use it) into this directory, and CHMOD it to be 755.

Open up your browser, type in http://www.YOUR-WEBSITE-URL.com/cgi-bin/nph-proxy.cgi (the URL to the script from your browser)

(ScreenShot)

CGIProxy should load.

(ScreenShot)

Enter the address of the file you wish to download from RapidShare.De into the box provided, uncheck “Remove all scripts”, and click “Begin Browsing”.

(ScreenShot)

From here, deal with RapidShare normally.

(ScreenShot)

Viola! Download!

Theory: In essence, you are placing your web server in front of your ISP’s transparent proxy. Therefore, RapidShare would be detecting your web host server, instead of the over-used transparent proxy. This eliminates the problem of competing with other users to use that precious one download slot. As long as nobody else is downloading from RapidShare via your web server address, that download slot perpetually belongs to you.

Footnotes:

Because this method stresses the web server’s downstream bandwidth, if you wish to download very often, either get yourself a dedicated server, or consider paying for RapidShare’s premium download instead.

You should also delete the script after you have finished, or isolate the script from usage by the Internet at large, or you risk getting a very strongly worded letter from your web host regarding your resource usage.

[tags]RapidShare, Downloading[/tags]

This post originates from Pkchukiss - Reality Wine. Read it on the original site:

Downloading from RapidShare.De