Sunday, May 3, 2009
Hello. Today is the summarized post for week number 2. This week, tutorials started, and the assignments came aplenty. This was when I realized that poly life wasn't going to be a walk in the park after all.Monday
I had the first full poly day in my life today. Tutorials only involve your class and your tutor, much like regular lessons in secondary school. We had CMM and J1 News tutorials today. CMM tutorial was actually pretty fun, thanks to Ms Tan. We formed our groups for our projects.
We had J1 News after that. You know how we all just link common things to one another? Like how one would assume that since J1 News lectures are fun, the tutorials would be the same? Well, it didn't work today. J1 News tutorial is boring, thanks to Mr. T. We also formed our groups.
After school was over, I waited for Say Yin and Andrew to end. That would be a two hour wait. I just ate alone at Mensa [EMO!!], and then I slacked in the library. I made sure that I got a good seat, one which could receive the full blast from the overhead air conditioners, because the weather was hot as ****.
When they eventually got dismissed, I was already waiting for them outside the tutorial rooms. We were going to play basketball. With my basketball. Which I had been carrying along with me throughout the day.
I was kinda excited to play before we actually started playing, but I got increasingly less motivated as time went on. Why? Like I said, the weather was hot as ****. Seriously, never ever play basketball at TP unless 1) there isn't a sun in the sky, or 2) you are in desperate need of a tan.
As Say Yin put it, that was one of the worst basketball games we ever played. The sun is a bastard.
We only played for about an hour or so, then we rushed back to the IT school food court, which was, god bless the designer, air conditioned!! Uber sense of relief!! We sat there and drank several cans of cold, carbonated drinks, then we went opposite TP for dinner.
Tuesday
Freakin long day!! Three lectures, each two hours long, with two one hour breaks in between. Started at 9am. Ended at 5pm. Waited one more hour for Say Yin and Andrew, so that I could have dinner with them.
We had the first Med Soc tutorial today. It seems that everyone who is good at Med Soc is uninteresting. If I had to use a colour to describe Mr. T our lecturer for this subject, it would be grey. Plain, dull, boring grey.
And to describe our tutor, Ms Tan, I would have to mention tens of colours. Not because she is a super colourful person. But because she is a super psychotic, confusing and chaotic swirl of colours that don't match.
She is supposed to be some professional at communicating with other, but to be honest, she freaks me out a little. It's not that she looks terrifying or anything, neither is it the way she talks. It is the stupid little smiles she gives at the end of certain sentences.
These aren't your normal smiles, but those sinister, turn-your-back-on-me-and-I'll-stab-you kind of smiles. And she does them at the worst possible times. "If you don't work hard throughout the term, then you will fail your exams" *smile*
Also, I lost my Ripcurl water bottle today!! The one I bought two years ago at Australia!! ****.
Wednesday
I was kinda pissed to attend school today. It was meant to be a day that I could wake up late, because school was supposed to start at 3pm, but I ended up waking up at my usual 6:10am timing.
Why? Since Friday is Labour Day, there is no school. And that would mean that there would be no CMM lecture this week. Well, that could never happen, so we had to attend the make up lecture today. At 9am.
Rather than making a big fuss out of it, I decided to be cooperative, and go to school. This was a smaller lecture, with only two out of the four classes attending. To brighten things up, our lecturer was Ms Tan. She released us half an hour earlier!!
It was 10:30am when we got released. Next lesson was at 3pm. Still, no time to slack. When had to do some interviews for our J1 News project!! There were three of us within the group. We met up with another group, so there were six of us altogether.
We had some food at the design school cafeteria, then we took a bus from TP to Tampines interchange, and then to some super ulu place. Seriously. You could hardly see any humans, or any forms of life for that matter.
We were supposed to find two distinctly unusual structures there, namely a NEWater plant, and a row of Chinese temples. We were supposed to interview people from either one of these places, and then we would have to present it during the next J1 News tutorial.
At first, we thought it would be easy. Just ask some one a few questions. How hard could it be? Well, as we were soon going to realise, the answer to that would be "pretty damn challenging".
Firstly, the NEWater plant would make a good story, as it is unique to see an above the ground reservoir, but it was difficult to find anyone to actually interview, since the place was virtually a ghost town.
So we went with the temples. We planned to interview one person from everyone of the 11 temples there, if time would permit. The first few reviews were promising, as the interviewees were more than happy to share some of their ample knowledge of the temple with us.
However, as we progressed from one temple to the other, things stopped going so smoothly. Many of the people we interviewed were almost clueless about the temples they worshiped in.
There was even this one lady who replied to almost everyone of our questions with one simple reply: "Ask god." Sure thing, why don't you call god down for me? Then we could finish our interview and get out of your life.
After about an hour of walking from temple to temple, we had a lot of information, but we only had sufficient facts on four temples to write a decent story. However, we were all tired by then, so we left the decision making for another day.
We decided to take a cab back to school, since the next lesson would be starting soon. We got back and got some stuff from Cheers, then we went to look for the classroom in which the next lesson was about to be held.
I'm not sure if it can really be described as a lesson. It is called APEL. Applied Principals for Effective Living. It sounds complicated, but it's basically Civics and Moral Education.
Our lecturer for APEL is Mr. Darryl David. Now, let me say this: I am freakin intimidated by him. He doesn't seem like a nasty person, but he is awfully efficient at nitpicking. The smallest things can cause him to flare up.
Anyways, APEL was kinda slack. Mr. D asked us to tell him our USP, or Unique Selling Point. In layman terms, he wanted us to tell him what we thought was unique about ourselves. He didn't want us to merely mention our hobbies; he wanted something that was really unique.
So everyone started thinking. From the start, I already had the fact that I could speak Chinese in mind, but I wasn't too sure about mentioning it, because I feared getting a "So what if you can speak Chinese? Many others can do that" kind of answer.
Then one of my friends said something, and Mr D said something like, "That's not really a USP. A USP would be like if Shiva told me that he could speak Chinese, then that would be unique."
Of course, people started laughing, and I told him that I did actually speak Chinese. He just smiled, and asked me how that happened. I told him that both my parents are mixed, and then he said, " I just gave you your USP man." I was just slacking for the rest of APEL.
Then we had Med Soc lecture, with the ever so vibrant Mr T. Rather than just dozing off for the entire duration of the lecture, some of us decided to play the penis game. Some of you might be wondering what exactly is that.
Basically, the first person whispers the word "penis", then the next person says it louder, and the volume increases as it goes down the line. This way, the last person would really be shouting out the word.
This was played during lecture, with a lecturer at the front of the lecture theater.
It was super hilarious. I wasn't playing, but most of the people around me were. At some times, the first person would already be shouting the word, so everyone else would have to say it even louder. The first fun Med Soc lecture I had.
Thursday
School only started at 3pm today, but I had to meet up with my J1 News project group at 12pm to complete our presentation, which was due next Monday.
We realised that our interview notes were devoid of any news worthy information, so the dreadful thoughts of having to go back for a second interview session were starting to surface. Luckily, one of the interviewees gave us the name card of the temple and guess what?
They had a website!! New age temple.
From the website, we found out that the temple also offered spiritual healing. So we made a few phone calls, and we got ourselves a whole lot of information. The medium of the temple didn't accept phone calls, so her assistant was interviewed instead.
We found out stuff like how the road was supposedly haunted. And how a lot of other streets are haunted as well. Also, if you are unlucky, you will see spirits. If you are really unlucky, then you get possessed. Then you have to go to that temple to get healed.
After typing all those out, and a bit of editing, we decided that we were happy enough with our work, so we went to eat at Mensa.
Soon, it was time for EssGra tutorial, which was going to be 3 hours long. It was going to be held in the Mac Lab, which was exclusive to CMM students.
I cannot describe how sexily superior the Mac Lab is compared to the normal computer labs. There are only about 30 Macs in the lab, so your individual working space is much more. The Macs all have large, w i d e s c r e e n panels.
Not only are the screens beautiful to look at, they are also large enough for you to hide behind if the tutor is pissed with the class. Which was the case at the start of this tutorial.
Our seniors told us that the compulsory textbook for EssGra was in actual fact not compulsory at all. It turned out that the book was compulsory, and since our whole class didn't have the book, we all got nagged at by Ms Teh.
She even sent us to the bookstore to get the books, but when we got there, there were only three copies remaining, so we went back to class. Since Ms Teh couldn't do much more, she just decided to proceed with the tutorial.
I think I'm going to ace EssGra. Everything Ms Teh thought to us was stuff I already learned years ago. Still, we were using CS4, and I only know CS3 properly, so there were still several things to learn.
After messing around with Illustrator for a few minutes, I more or less got the hang of the program. I can't wait to use Photoshop, because I find it the most user friendly program in the Adobe family.
After tutorial, I met up with Say Yin and Andrew, and we took a bus to Jonathan Mok's house, because Joel's birthday party was being celebrated there.
By the time we got there, it was already about 8pm, and we were the only people there who weren't from CJC. I didn't eat much, because I wasn't too hungry. I just talked with most of the people there, whether I knew them or not.
I also got pushed into the pool twice, and I pulled Andrew in with me once. There was a wide array of drinks, including several alcoholic ones. I drank only a bit of vodka mixed with F&N Orange.
The night was an eventful one. Why? Something epic happened. We got a visit from Sun Wu Kong!! Seriously. Once everyone started leaving, we helped Jonathan carry some stuff up to his house, and we played a bit of Guitar Hero.
Friday
NO SCHOOL TODAY!! Isn't that nice. I also finally got to play Xbox after not playing for more than a week. I just played Guitar Hero Metallica. I am not pleased by standard of playing the Master of Puppets solo, so I'm really working hard on that right now.
Other than that, I didn't go out until at night. I went out of my house happy, I came back home ecstatic.
Saturday
I got woken up at 8am today!! What the ****. I slept at 4am in the morning, thinking that I could wake up at 10am or something. My parents were supposed to go for the "Partners in Education" talk at TP, but my mother couldn't go, so I had to substitute her.
I went with my father, and the talk was in Auditorium 1. It was really boring. Bascially the same thing as the talks we had on the first day of Business Orientation, but way more dull, since there were no performances.
Also, parents ask a lot of questions. Some of which were really dumb. Everyone was given a file, and inside the file, there was a FAQ sheet. If they had read the FAQ, the QnA session would have ended in half the time.
After a torturous 2 hours, we were finally allowed to leave the place. My dad gave me a lift to Tampines Mall, and I met Syafiqah and Fernelli there. We took a bus back to school to meet Damien, then we took a cab to Fiona's house.
Fiona's house is a huge, three story tall terrace. We were meeting up today to discuss and decided on our product for the CMM project. After an hour or so of research, we decided to do F&N. After that, Damien started typing stuff while the rest of us slacked.
At about 4:30pm, we all took a bus back to Tampines Interchange, then we parted ways. I had to take a train all the way back to Tiong Bahru. I actually dozed off in the train. First time I've ever done that.
Sunday
We went to watch X-Men Origins: Wolverine today!! I met Say Yin, Marcus and Yeow Boon at Plaza Singapura at 2:30pm, then we bought tickets and went to eat. For the first time ever, we actually managed to get good seats.
We were soon joined by Sebastian and Osel. After lunch, we continued to walk around. We went to look at some laptops. I was super tempted to buy the Wolverine game, because it only costed $75 at some shop there, as compared to the usual $85 selling price in other shops.
At that point of time, I decided against it, and I am freaking regretting now.
Anyways, we finally met up with Andrew, and we went to watch the movie. I came out of the theatre not knowing whether to be pleased or disappointed by it. Check back tomorrow for the full review, because I am too damn tired to do it now.
So yeah, that's the second week in review. Now, normal posting can resume!!
Ok, I'm done for today. Thanks for reading. Ending off, see you tomorrow.
posted @ 11:15 PM
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