Already, when I went to the site today, the main comment page was cluttered by skirmishes between frequent visitors, some of whom were posting by masquerading as the new owner (it’s easy to tell because the neglected state of the site shows that the administrator is not even active on the website).

Frankly, it’s a pity that such a good resource on Wordpress theme designing is being abandoned just like that. I made this blog’s current design after following the tutorials on WPDesigner (then still run by Small Potato). I believe that site would have gone even further if he had decided to stay on; plus I would be able to read more tutorials for free! Busy me can’t find the time to go around Google hunting for another similar site!

Oh well, stuff on the Internet come and go all the time; the burst bubble of 2000 remains very clear in my mind. In fact, for all you know, SgBlogging could simply just disappear into the night one day! (Mwahahahaha!) So, any bribe offers?

If you don’t know already, caramelldansen is an Internet meme where cartoon, manga or comic characters do the rabbit ear dance to the song Caramelldansen (by the Swedish group Caramell).

Now, having read about the stories about antics of their pets from other pet owners, like Mr Miyagi, as well as the adventures of a SPCA Volunteer, I giggled myself silly at the prospect of having my own animal stories to tell. And then stopped short.

I’m not sure if getting a pet is a good proposition at all. For the better part of my early childhood, I had hamsters, which were supposedly meant to be my playmates. They were interesting to me for a little while, but being the couch potato television addict that I was, left them alone in their cages. My mom cleaned their cages and fed them. But the hamsters bred fast, and since they don’t have notions of incest, leaving a son and mother together for too long will soon find the cage filled with little hamsters.

Despite her urging me to help take care of them, I always walked past the cage without taking a second look. The hamsters didn’t stink (or at least their smell wasn’t smelly to me), but if I was not going to take care of the hamsters, I shouldn’t be allowed to have pets. And with that, she gave the newborns to other people once they were big enough, and we kept the incestuous son and mother hamster in a blue tank originally meant for fishes until they passed away of old age.

After that point, I was banned from having any pets. Not that I really cared anyway, since I was always hanging out in the media resource room in school after classes until the sun set. The Internet industry in Singapore was in its infancy, and I was already an addict. That marked the end of the age where pets were in my lives — perhaps for their good.

10 years later, and I find myself out of National Service. With the Internet so prevalent in Singapore it is easy for pet owners to go online and share their pet experiences with the world. Reading their blogs sometimes make me wish to have a pet, but deep within my heart I know that I’m still not sure if I can, or am willing to take care of an animal. Dogs may be lovable, excitable and easily satisfied, but with me coming home from school at 5-6pm in the evening, and leaving the house at 7am in the morning, I”m doubtful that I can devote enough attention to one. Sure, I can feed it, clean its litter or give it a shower, but if I can’t find time to play with it, that would be tantamount to bringing in a pet, and then wasting its time in my house. I’d rather not adopt one, so that it has a better chance of finding a good family to adopt it.

Maybe I should give myself another 10 years to think this over.

Sharing a room with many other people may be fun, but there are times when I just want to be alone and stay in bed all day. I’m the sensitive new age guy who needs down-time. Yeah, I even have No-Phone days. In fact, I never pick up the house phone: if it rings while I’m alone in the house, I’ll just unplug the extension But that’s a story for another day.

Getting ordered around in uniform is ugly, but it’s a reflection of the real world out there in the mini-ecosystem. While it provides a peek at the world, I don’t think that the real bosses out there in the world would scream at you for the little nits. The working world out there doesn’t care if you have a thread straying from your shirt, neither does it mandate that you have to spend your own money to sew a new rank on the shoulder (local promotion without any allowance increase), only to take them down and sew a new one the next month. (I’m still sore over that one)

Anyway, this post will surely attract all some of those old reservist personnel thinking that I’m a young punk who hasn’t worked a single day in his life.

If you’re the above, let me tell you this: having worked one whole year in a local company, and two and a third years in the army, I prefer working in the real world better. Do what fits you, but in my opinion, the real world is the better choice.

You see, I got myself a Fujifilm S5800 point-and-shoot camera around one moon ago, after my Casio QV-R61 camera went kaput. The new camera allows me to play with the shot aperture and shutter timing, and I learnt quite a bit about the photography world. Plus a friend, his uncle and his uncle’s friend, all three whom are insanely into photography (I’m looking at you, Xiang Ju), I got sucked deeply into the world of filling up memory cards with RAW and JPEG files.

Well, without further ado:

Welcome back to the jungle

There are many things you can take pictures of, and the beauty of the place cannot be something you are able to appreciate, especially when you are busy hiding inside of it. To put it into perspective, you can’t really care what prickly or ant-infested plant you’re hiding behind when the battle is raging all around you. (Until you get angry ants biting chunks off you)

I’m not sure if the water is totally safe to drink, but if it were some 20km from the nearest civilisation, just like how Brunei’s forests were, I would have no problems drinking it… if I had purification tablets (haha!). The clear stream flows steadily, and had a nice gurgling sound that I wouldn’t mind sitting down and staring at. I simply have no problem watching water flow past me all day.

I managed to capture a picture of a dragonfly!

It was nice enough to let me close in to take a picture of it, but it flew off after I snapped this picture. I wanted to snap more of it in this pose since it looked really good, and I was afraid that this photo turned out blurry. Thank goodness ISO 400 was enough to use a high speed shutter to counteract my shakey hands!

This is Xiang Ju trying to take a picture of a snail with his dSLR, the Nikon D80. dSLRs are professional level cameras that serious photographers use to take pictures. It is many times better than my point-and-shoot camera, especially in terms of ISO performance. These cameras can really go up to ISO 1600 without introducing too much noise into the picture. Already, I’m using ISO 400, and the image quality is starting to suffer.

Now, my camera may not be too good with pictures, I dare say it is good enough for photography beginners like me. This flower looks really pretty, but I don’t know its name. I also over-exposed its white parts, though I didn’t have the time to re-do this, since everybody was going on ahead without me already.

Xiang Ju was extremely shagged out by the climb, so he took a rest on the floor, while I snapped some pictures discreetly. You can call this his personal portfolio

Later, Xiang Ju’s uncle treated us to Roti Prata at Shibly Indian Restaurant. It’s the stretch off Old Thomson Road, at Casurina Drive (I think). I knew that I should have taken a picture of the road name to remind me!

The Roti Prata tastes a bit cheesy, but has a firm bounce with a slight crisp. Probably a bit over-done, but I like it all the same. They might need to work on spreading the egg, since the egg yolk was clustered near the centre. The egg white is essentially tasteless, so parts of the prata tastes like the plain version.

Here ends my first photo-shoot with my “bridge” camera. Critiques and comments (only on the pictures!) are welcome! If you have any photo-shoot, please ask me along too! I hope to learn as much as possible!

Vegetarian Bee Hoon with mock meat, accompanied by cabbage. When you are a poor student, this is all you can afford for lunch. It’s nice though, and since I like vegetarian food a lot, this is one of the meal that I eat as a staple diet. That’s how I’m getting fat!

Vegetarian food consists of a lot of flour, since the mock meat is usually formed from the flour, and then mixed with food colouring. Seasoning is added to get a taste close to the real thing.

However, at times, the huge amount of red tape hanging around most government institutions make it a frustrating process to get things done in a timely manner. Where certain time sensitive issues are concerned, it might have been far too late to have it settled through normal channels. For example, I don’t believe that a certain laptop provider would have revised the prices of the products in time for the enrollment drive if we had not raised our concerns directly with the Principal. Already, a check on its website still shows the old, more expensive offers for other polytechnics. I won’t elaborate on this, because it isn’t the point of this post.

The issue that I would like to address is the appropriate use of channels for complaints. After the letter regarding the pricing of the laptops was sent in, I received word that we caused some unhappiness that we had skipped over the chain of command, and had worded the complaint too strongly. While the issue is now closed, I would like to clarify my rationale on why we acted as we did.

Firstly, the letter was written on the weekend prior to the start of the enrollment drive - the freshmen would have been purchasing laptops based on the official price list given by the vendor, which is outdated, and more expensive. I believe that this is not a fair deal for the incoming first years, as it is always implied that the laptop offers in the school would always be cheaper than the recommended retail price. Leaving the situation as it is would be unconscionable. There simply wasn’t enough time to send an email to a generic feedback line and hope for an answer: the last time I used that, it took one week to get an answer, which if it happened this time round, would have been too late to salvage the situation.

Secondly, there was no way to contact the department or a person in charge of the event. No emails nor telephone numbers were listed on the laptop road show web page. Facing the lack of an immediate way of reaching the decision maker, that was when I decided that we should write to the Principal.

Now, while I believe that the level of escalation was appropriate, I don’t believe that the tone of our letter was correct. Inside the email that was eventually sent out, I added the word “blatant fleecing”, which was a really negative and accusative phrase to use in the context of sending in a complaint. I agree that my tone was wrong, and for that I do owe the recipients of the letter an apology. The most constructive feedback, and one that would get the swiftest response would be the one that is positive, and targeting only the issue on hand.

It is a lesson learnt, and I do hope that fellow frustrated people out there will similarly keep your cool and do the thing that is most beneficial to the situation. After all, we do start out with the eventual goal of solving the situation. Using the wrong tone would only heighten tensions: even if the problem was resolved, the new cracks that appear in your relationship may eventually lead to more communication problems down the road.

There are 30 minutes to register GEMs for this semester, and I spent the entire 30 minutes trying to log in. Here’s what I got 99% of the time within the registration system:

This is not the first time that SP’s computer systems have failed during critical times. At the start of last semester, the wireless internet access around the school campus was very slow, downloading notes and Powerpoint slides took atrociously long (anyone would be pissed to get 5 kB/s thoroughput from the school servers).

Then came the wireless access point upgrades, which closed off all ports except 80, and also caused my laptop to have a hard time just trying to associating with the access point. The entire fiasco took a long time to resolve, and ended with me spending money out of my pocket to sign up for a HSDPA plan from SingTel to tide over the ridiculous situation.

I also had problems connecting to my MySQL server at port 3306 to upload the database needed for my assignment to work. It was only when I finally got my HSDPA modem that I could get this done.

The computer infrastructure in Singapore Polytechnic is abysmal, with erratic problems cropping up all the time. This nightmare might continue tonight, as I attempt to register for the GEMs again during the next open registration window.

But nothing compares to this:

It doesn’t work on me though, I just cleaned my keyboard yesterday.

Both comics created by xkcd. Original: [1] and [2]

During the semester, I relaxed a bit on paying attention during Java lessons, because the lecturer was focusing on the basics of programming. After my background in Visual Basic, as well as PHP and Perl, the semantics of Java was relatively smooth sailing. So, during class, I tried to read up on more advanced programming topics, like multi-threaded programming, inheritance and poly-morphism. There’s a lot of things I don’t know, and it kept me a happy camper during lesson time.

I couldn’t do the same for the network fundamentals class though: there are many new terms to learn, like network devices, connections, and theories of network design, as well as the humbling experience that the Internet evolved from a small network in Arpanet into the bludgeoning monster that keeps growing exponentially every second. Kind of like Katamari Damacy without all that cute animation. It gets a bit spooky thinking that the only things that form this creature are switches, routers, and many million kilometres of cabling. I wonder how it feels like to have all those cable dumped in Singapore?

Anyway, I am quite happy with the results this semester, even though I did not achieve the ludicrous 4.0 GPA. It is a really hard feat to manage, especially when I plunged in and took the Introduction to Web Graphic Design module as my elective. This is one really subjective module. Some of my classmates got a B+, which is obviously better than the B I got, but I’m not complaining. My strength lies in coding stuff up, and the odds are I’ll go into Computer Science, so the B isn’t too big a blip on the radar. After all, we’re talking about the person labelled “The Art Terrorist” by his art teacher back in secondary school! Rather, my biggest worry was for my mathematics. It was 4 whole years since I touched anything beyond +-x÷ on a calculator, and I didn’t traditionally score well for my secondary school and junior college math, so I was exhilarated that I got an A this time round!