This is an example of the stuff I talk about if we hang out together.
But nothing compares to this:
It doesn’t work on me though, I just cleaned my keyboard yesterday.
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Well, the actual results came out 3 days before the end of last month, but I didn’t have the time to write about them. 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!
Blogging things somewhere enables you to accumulate an archive of your life’s history, so that you can go back to it frequently. That makes for really good “ah-ha!” moments when you realised that things had changed within that 1 year since you wrote that entry. For me, the most striking thing that has stood out so far is the weather. Never mind why I suddenly thought about the sky today, (I have no idea why either) but if you dig into this blog archive, you can see an entry in March last year where I complained about the heat. Well, I’m surprised that I even complained about the excessive sun last year; just ask anybody on the street, and they would agree that this March is unusually wet and cold. While La Nina might have grown stronger these days, the subtly accented coolness in the air really underscores the difference between the two Marches. It shouldn’t really matter much, in tropical Singapore, if not for the fact that I was stuck in school for the past 4 weeks, working on a video for the school’s enrollment drive. I don’t believe it explains why I didn’t manage my time well enough to fit everything around work time, but at least it accounts for being in school from dawn till way past dusk. Nevertheless, we’ve finished the video now, so I should be reasonably left-alone to write more… I think. Already this is sounding like an attempt to excuse myself, so I’ll stop for today. It’s Sunday! I’m going to just kick back in bed and catch up on the long queue of anime, manga and Life-hacking that I missed for the past 3 weeks or so. I have more than 380 LifeHacker posts to catch up! We breached 2008 20 days ago, and other than the last post of 2007, there I haven’t been blogging. I wanted to give bite-sized bits a try-out, but they just don’t fit my style of doing things. I want to do things big, and that includes the stuff I write. So far, nobody has complained that I write too much, which means I think that the current way I’m sticking to works. Wait a minute, nobody could be complaining because not many people read this blog anyway! Well, no time to ponder over this yet; the examinations start in 3 days, and I need to really study hard for it. After setting a precedent of achieving a perfect GPA score for the last semester, I feel a pressure to keep it up for this one. That Maths would be tested this time round probably adds to the excitement, since it is usually my weakest link, so I dare say that this semester’s results would really be an indicator if the new style of revision works. So, it’s back to the mugging for me (please feel free to call me a mugger, I really like that label), and I’ll blog again whenever I can. Let me correct my last statement: I’ll blog again when Maths frustrate me so much I feel like tearing my hair out. Work is piling up to my nose, so I’ve decided to temporarily stop blogging until I finish my assignments. I’ve also removed the tag-board since I couldn’t get rid of spam comments as fast as the automated spam bots could dump them. You can still email me through the contact page, but I would very much prefer if you would post your comments in the post itself so that everyone else can share in your 2 cents worth. Meanwhile, Mr Wang has posted some comments on the IDA’s creative manipulation to artificially boost Singapore’s Internet penetration statistics. I’m not surprised; after all, we’re talking about the same agency that made the $388 million “honest mistake” where the entire country’s tax-payers paid for this incident, while bureaucrats carried on their lives as if nothing had happened. Angry Doctor analyses MOE’s statistics, and shows just how irrelevant the race-based breakdown on the recent PSLE results really are, and how that MOH exhibits same said creativity through its AIDS statistics. If, after you have read the two articles, you still feel that Singaporean tax-payers are paying good money for competence, Molly is here to wake you up from dreamland. Like they say in the army, “wake up your bloody idea!” Here’s my wishing to you a Happy New Year in advance! I can’t really put my finger on it, but does it look like most of Singapore’s worst arguments of logic coming from ladies? Here’s another one, this time on the issue of overcrowding on the North-East line.
Ms Kuah, I was happily reading your letter in hope that The Straits Times has finally decided to post something that makes sense. And then I saw your last paragraph. Are you telling me that designating a “few” carriages for women will solve the problem of overcrowding on trains? So we decide to take up this suggestion in its infinite wisdom and do just that. The ladies take up two or three carriages out of six on the train, and the smelly men are all packed into the other three cabins. How does that enable more people to pack into the same MRT train? We still have the same number of commuters trying to squeeze into the same train; designating sections for ladies will at its best improve the situation for the ladies. Men would have only 3 cabins to go to, compared to all 6 for the ladies. If that doesn’t sound sexist, her implicit declaration that men perspire and smell does. I myself board the train at Boon Keng station, and I travel to Outram Park for my line transfer to the West line. What I’ve seen is that wait times for the next train will always be at least 5 minutes during the morning peak hours. Unless the train interval is there for the sake of safety (in which case I would have rather had the safety officers in the train manually operate the train during peak hours to enable more trains to operate at one time), I don’t see any other reason for operating that few trains, except perhaps SBSTransit is trying to get away with packing as many people like sardines into a can as it can get away with. This is yet another example which shows that the competition situation in the transportation arena is sorely lacking. Without either competition or governmental regulation, passengers are the only losers in this game. Chamber wrote a little about how he studies in school. Essentially, he calls it a game plan that allows him to absorb the material so that he can squeeze things out like a sponge when exams come by. 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? 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 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: Try this for a fit: It even works for numbers too: 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? Gee, I’m not sure why I didn’t catch on to this earlier - it could be the brain-washing liquid sloshing around in my mind, but Molly brought up an important point on small increases on hospital fees. That was when the eureka moment unburied itself from the heap of nonsense, and leapt into my mind with the magnitude of a mini-shock. Remember how the PTC and the PAP government keeps expounding on the merits of small incremental hikes in bus fares to “minimise the impact of eventual fare hikes” and that “it is better than having one big price increase a few years down the road”? Well, the sad truth is, you pay more during these incremental increases than you do if the increase was done at one shot. Take an example: Ignoring leap years, assume that somebody makes two trips a day, the total amount forked out by one person for the bus fare would be: 0.60 * 365 * 2 + 0.61 * 365 * 2 + 0.62 * 365 * 2 + 0.63 * 365 * 2 = 438 + 445.30 + 452.60 + 459.90 = 1795.80 Now, if things were different, and the price was increased in chunks - as and when it is really required: (we’ll assume that the price was hiked by 3 cents in 2010 because fuel prices went into stratospheric ) Total savings for consumers had price hikes been done as and when it is required in this scenario: 1795.80 - 1773.90 = 21.90 Now, the scenario I put out here is unrealistic. Firstly, the “small increases” referred to are in the ballpark of 5 to 10 cents, secondly, it assumes that the cost of maintaining the transportation system can only go up. Passengers stand to save a lot more than the cumulative $21.90 if the PTC only approved fare hikes only when it is needed. I won’t go into the other areas in this issue, as the point I merely wish to highlight is how the public is being led to believe that small increases are beneficial to them. This is also an important lesson to me: the dangers of mis-information is very real. Having The Straits Times as the main staple diet of local news will lead to a biased grasp on the issue at hand. Thank goodness for the Internet. |
