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drive is a thing so elusive, one moment it comes, the next moment it slips.

thankfully, i'm driven today. perhaps by fear?

tomorrow is the day i conduct my pilot test with eight people.

and the next week is the real thing.

without saying, today will a busy day for tomorrow's sake.

In school now. Just settled down.

there's not a single soul, except for the foreign students quietly hidden away in the labs.

tomorrow's is also the first day of school for the new semester.

can't help feeling the blues.

as always, there are two sides to the coin,

it's either the start of school or the last semester of undergrad studies.

i prefer to think the latter but tend towards the former.

let's hope the next two crucial weeks will be smooth sailing.

okay it's time to sign off. down to work.

FY2009 Report

it's almost another year. not very eventful.

Jan-May 2009. student exchange programme.

I loved being an exchange student. Those were the days of respite. I could put aside all my worries as I need only average passes.

the professor teaching the supply chain module inspired me with his unconventional ways.
Intensity and toughness radiated within his tiny wiry figure. He gave practical take-home advice and I like that.

At the partner university, I was also lucky to have hardworking people in my project teams except a small handful. Coincidentally, the outlaws formed a team:

it was a all-girls team except for my friend and I.
one girl didn't show up at meetings until the day before presentation. reason: not feeling well.
another girl claimed to be knowledgeable but would panic at the sight of problems. just like a doctor couldn't stand blood.
another girl would cling on to writing reports.
the end?
I marked them down in my appraisals. despite one of them being from the same polytechnic as me. having met numerous fiends, i was extremely intolerant.

Aside from this experience, i had some difficulty understanding statistics and coping with my operating systems module.

But overall, exchange was a good experience.

Jun-Jul 2009. start of final year project.

lots of printing and reading. learning the ropes to research. other than work, life was monotonous. took on some freelance work but ended up not delivering on time and eventually aborting the project. i felt like a joke.

Aug - Nov 2009. This part of my life is called hell weeks.

research combined with heavy development.
developing a large scale system was very hard.
not everyone was committed.
five of six guys had to cope with research work. i was one of them.
the system development had a few milestones and deadlines.
each represented one or more sleepless nights in school.
for almost every day i was typing code and pulling my hair out.
shortly after we delivered the system, three others and I continued to write our progress reports for another two nights in school, one of which fell on the day everyone speculated that there would be meteor rain.
in fact, upon finishing the report, i sat staring at the skies for a whole 2o minutes in the wee hours just outside the faculty building and i saw nothing.
a few days later, the first exam came and i still prepared to my best of ability.
unexpectedly, a lot of questions came from the guest lecture and i slept through that lecture out of sheer fatigue.
actually, on hindsight, only one guy on the project team wasn't committed. he was smart and he presented himself well. he wrote good english as well. but he just wasn't with us. as much as we didnt understand him, he didnt understand how bad our team situation was.

that pretty much summed up the entire part of hell weeks.

Dec 2009 - future.

I'm currently still busy with research work. I'm left with half a year and then I would serve my remaining days in national service. my new year resolutions are:

• shape up (a lofty goal)
• secure a good job
• stay happy
  

i didn't set out to write a financial report but it looks like i have written a fiscal year report. I hope next year's "financials" would be better not just for me, but for you too, my reader.

I'm grateful to those who helped me in my pretest survey.

I know I haven't talked to some of you in ages and for this once i did, it was shamelessly for a survey. I feel bad about this but I have no choice since I don't have a lot of contacts to begin with.

Anyway, thank you if you have taken part in this survey. =)

I am left with about 6 more responses.

Hopefully things will be alright.

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I realized even after the examinations, days still flew by.
many of my peers took upgrading and certification courses.
i choose not to do the same.
Just to offload my heavily stressed pea brain.
I was back in work, working on my badly managed honors year project.
I still hate what happened.
dialogue sessions, feedback? lip service.
so like Shakira says, "so don't bother~"
perhaps more foresight but not so much as to have oversight.

I need to learn statistics, experiment design and conduct pretest and pilot test all in one month.
To my horror, the help I envisioned would not be available as most of the people would be overseas for a conference until the 20th.
I was referred to a PhD student. I contacted him and he told me he was going back to China.
And come 20th, it dawned on me that it's 5 days to xmas.
It feels like one of those many times that I want to throw in the towel or raise a white flag.

I want to "biang biang" people.

The examinations have finally ended.
i feel like a plane which has flown across the Atlantic Ocean.
The wings are battered and a few screws are falling off.
It's going to take a long time to service this plane.

Struggles

I believe that nobody reads this blog anymore.
reason(s):
1. This blog has been abandoned for a long time.
2. Its owner only writes about school and nothing else.

Still, I want to say that this has been a painful semester.
night after night my teammates and I stayed in school.
I think I must have wrote more than 10000 lines of code.
The number of report pages exceeded 500.
And a final presentation rehearsal spanned 7 hours with the final presentation hitting 3 hours.
What you've just read is not a myth, it is a module. One module.
Together with a honors year research project and two other modules, a perfect hell was conceived.
In retrospect, I learned a few things,
- clever and bright people may not make the best teammates.
- never use windows vista + eclipse for development. Horribly slow.
- tough men may last, but tough times may last even longer.
- Murphy's law always hold. perfectly fine programs crumble during presentations.

I m tough but I have broken down a few times amidst these tougher than tough times. The next things coming up is an exam and finally operationalizing my research. If you read, pray for me. I need lots of luck for the next few months.

I stopped updating for a while because I was busily writing and programming in school.

It's been the toughest semester so far.

For last one week alone, I stayed over two nights in school. In total, for the entire semester until now, the number of stay overs must have easily exceeded ten.

it's two weeks to the end of all horror, a 200+ functions system with reports spanning two to three hundred pages.

why must "they" do this to us? it's horribly unfair to drive us to do honors year project and deliver a large system at the same time. Had that not been the case, programming would have been more fun and days wouldn't be gloomy.