Blip blip

I was walking home today when I saw one of those price signs outside petrol stations flashing and displaying weird things.. and spotted a attendant holding a printout and pointing a remote at it.

Amusing.

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I’m constantly stuck in a cycle of being swept away in the school’s currents, forgetting who I am, what I do, why I do, and then being jolted back to reality. It is sobering but yet it is always easy to get drunk on the sweet draught of success.

So, here is the text of an interesting sermon from The Brick Presbyterian Church in the City of New York, talking about balancing humility and being proud of what has been done, and revolves around A.M.D.G.

There is more significance and meaning in “To God Be The Glory” than is sketched by its overuse in school. It is a timely reminder before the competition season comes round.

Clubs

Vivocity’s car park redemption/membership scheme’s redemption process is inherently flawed. Scanning anything from a handful to dozens of receipts for every customer, on top of blipping a barcoded card and data entry? FAIL.

Poor people sitting there all day, watching the queues lengthen and stay long..

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Marche Vivocity was pretty okay. About $15+ per pax, for a main dish, no drinks.. in any regular, non-sharing outing, be prepared to spend $25 upwards. The pork knuckle was huge, the (savoury) crêpe hadn’t shrunk (but prices haven’t stayed the same), and the rosti tasted good.

The place was really tight and claustrophic, a la Giant Turf City, and I constantly felt disoriented while walking around picking food. Marche Heeren/Suntec might hae been better; too long ago to compare.

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There are so many permutations to be seen in statutory names in Singapore, that it is non-trivial to automate picking out family and given names from a given string. Who’s up to writing something that does that, consistently? Even when using humans, it’s not easy.

Even if you’ve managed to extract that, how do you mangle it to get usernames? There are several schools of thought – short and add numbers to differentiate, or long and pray that we’re somewhere else and everyone has very strange given and family name combinations. On the whole, the latter will yield fewer cases of ‘irrationally appended’ numerals, but affects everyone by simple virtue of length and keystrokes; the former means much shorter usernames, but with a number or two tacked on afterwards. You will still remember it, number or no number, and whether it is memorable to others is inconsequential – that is what people directories and the wonders of technology are for.

The challenge facing an educational institution with a large churn rate is rather different from that of a large corporation, local or multinational. We cannot just cut-and-paste a solution to this.

Let’s take a look at some possible conventional usernames for “Lee Chiang Fong”:
chiangfonglee
leechiangfong
leecfong
lcfong
leecf
lcf


This is before things like dots, underscores, appended numeral(s) and the ilk come into play. The cat is not away.

The organisation is using the first ‘convention’ while I stick to recommending the last. It’s easier to maintain on a large scale, especially for batch imports (just grab the initials and tack on a number) and syncs, and might wear everyone’s fingers out a bit less.

Amusements

I am amused. But I am easily amused.

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Less than 48 hours on a whirlwind prep for a pitch, and it’s all over. In two weeks, we’ll either randomly celebrate or just get on with the mugging.

But something strange happened yesterday. Suddenly after dinner, I was reminded that everything was given by the divine, intelligence included, and hence I must remember to ‘give glory to God’. It’s something I haven’t thought about for a while.

Then afterwards I noticed AMDG in someone’s display name on MSN. A fitting reminder.

It is strange being roped into bio stuff without being a bio student.

Spotlights

Silvers of thoughts.

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My stomach feels rather unsettled.

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It takes quite a bit to get me to visit Anchorpoint, and today it was because IKEA Alexandra’s restaurant was closed for their renovations.

Anchorpoint has changed a lot since the last time I was there, decor and tenants have definitely changed for the better. It’s actually busy on a Saturday evening. Big improvement.

The pizza at the Koufu food court in the basement is rather expensive, but good.

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Speaking of improvements, I must insert some kudos here for the Transport Ministry + Land Transport Authority and friends. On Wednesday evening, leaving school slightly after 5.30pm and into the evening peak hour, it was only a wait of 40 minutes for a 30 minute bus ride! Fantastic, given that the rated frequency for PM Peak period is 9-15 minutes, and an off-peak ride is 15-20 minutes.

I ought to have used iris. Then I could have spent that extra half an hour in school finishing things up instead. Or left five minutes earlier to save myself nearly an hour.

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Amusing how some people observe that I’m very busy, while others that I’m very free..

The former is starting to make sense. I think I make or let myself be busied with lots and lots of extracurricular assignments, work and so on, simply because I cannot match the people I’m surrounded by (and surround myself with) in academia. Really.

A friend asked me yesterday about why I was so geeky, and yet didn’t seem to do anything geeky. Like overclock computers, game, do crazy liquid nitrogen experiments, or the like. I was stumped.

What do you think I do?

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One hack of a packed week is about to begin. I ought to be overjoyed and jubilant that my weekends are relatively free, and that my weeknights aren’t taken up by training or whatever, but somehow.. it just doesn’t really work out. I abuse my free time.

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Multitasking is buggy in humans. For me, context switching can be difficult.. so I prefer to spend chunks of time (a block of evenings) on one thing at a time. Like evaluating and testing software, or investigating golden years, or perhaps figuring out the car (re)sale market.

But homework is ‘one thing’.. so it gets neglected. My next actions list is at around 20 items now. GTD isn’t a magic cure-all, you still need the force and momentum to carry things through.

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Whenever I think about planning purchases and the like, the Band admin people come to mind :p At least my documentation is electronic or has been digitised. Don’t you dare mention business process management/workflow to me.

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My Apple Remote has been unreliable recently. It only works either when a) squeezed somewhere below the menu button, or b) held in a horizontal position and with lots of hope in it. There’s something funky with the battery contacts, and I can’t find anything with the correct shape to bend it up or something. Annoying.

Salling Clicker doesn’t always work properly, and the bluetooth is a bit wonky today too.

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VMware Fusion 1.1 doesn’t play well with Leopard. Some deadlock happens and it actually manages to make Mac OS X screw up and not shut down/reboot properly.

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˙ʎɹɐǝʍ

Renaissance

1 year 9 months. A new lease of life.