The year 2009 is coming to an end soon. In a short span of time, it’s already 30th December, and its just another day more before we usher in the new year, 2010. As usual, 2009 just seems like another year that has gone past. Nothing much has been done in the year 2009, but I guess as usual it is the experiences that you make that allows one to grow up.
With the end of 2009, I see myself in the 3rd year of university, and I am about to step into my Industrial Attachment soon. Some of my friends have gone for their exchange program; others are embarking on their exchange program in the subsequent semester. Some friends will go for Industrial Attachment; others will stay in school as normal university students taking 5 modules.
What has the year 2009 been in my life?
I scored my best grades in university, and missed my aim by 0.1.
I went for my 3rd Oweek, 2nd time as a councillor, and knew so many more people.
What else?
I find that other than all these, there’s nothing much I have done other than to just go through motion in school. It’s a little sad that there isn’t much things exciting to talk about. I didn’t do anything special. Maybe the start of ramen hunting in Singapore, going to Ramen Santouka at Central and Aoba at Ion. What else? Like nothing else already.
Haha. My life is so boring.
After getting results on the 22nd, my JC clique met up for a long planned buffet outing on the 23rd. This time, 3 out of 5 of us attained our targets for the semester and hence has to treat the sad people to a buffet. Well, it is not exactly a treat since they would have to pay a lot, so it was a subsidy. People who are not treating will only pay $15; Treaters will pay the rest.
Anyway we settled on the Hokkaido Jap Restaurant, which I found via Google. It was a sponsored search item, so I clicked it to go to the website. It seems to have a wide variety of sushi and sashimi and other stuff, so my clique decided to go there.
It’s located all the way in Turf City; For the clueless, it is actually in Bukit Timah, near schools like National Junior College, which was where the 5 of us were from. It was a pain to go there if we have to go by ourselves. Thankfully there was a shuttle bus, so we would not need to walk all the way in from the bus stop outside at the main road. The shuttle bus locations are from Clementi Bus Interchange, Toa Payoh Bus Interchange and Opposite Sixth Avenue.
Waikit and I took from Clementi and the rest from Toa Payoh. The clementi bus stopped opposite sixth Avenue. I am not sure if the Toa Payoh one did, but I doubt it since the direction seems to be out of place. The buffet has a weekday promotion, 1 adult free for every 5 adults there. I am not sure if there should be 6 people, or 5 people is alright already. Anyway dom brought his long time girlfriend since 2003 along, and it was the first time I met her.
Anyway the main point is the buffet, which was Ala Carte style. Hence you have to order the dishes from the waitress. The thing that I am not really happy about is that the portions are weird. Some dish comes with a lot so apparently 6 of us can eat. Some we have to specify how many portions we want. It becomes a little confusing. Tea is served complimentary but other drinks are not. There are no desserts too.
I find that the dishes are so-so only, with the teppanyaki dishes being the best, especially the beef. The seafood is not that bad, I like the squid and the fish. The prawn has the nice taste at the shell, but the meat is just like a normal boiled prawn. The chicken teppanyaki is not that outstanding.
Some dishes seems unique but disappointed me. Cheese chawanmushi makes me think of a chawanmushi dish infused with cheese, but it is actually just chawanmushi with a layer of melted cheese on top like pizza. The combination is a little weird, so I ate the cheese before eating the chawanmushi.
The Clam Miso Soup sounds like a delicious soup cooked with Clams, but it seems to be actually diluted miso soup with clams added when needed. Why do I say diluted? The miso doesn’t have the concentrated taste. Even the Jap stall at TechnoEdge, NUS, can do much better. The miso doesn’t have any taste of the sea, so it is extremely disappointing.
My clique did not eat much sushi since we didn’t want to be overly full with rice. But I ate some sushi, and it wasn’t fantastic either. I guess if you want to eat buffet that is affordable, you have to sacrifice quality. Which is why my clique will be going to quality in the future instead of quantity. Our stomachs seem to have shrunk too.
The worst thing was that some dishes did not come. They seem to have forgotten about it. Especially my Inari sushi. I ordered Inari, Crab and Tamago sushi, but they forgot Inari, which is my favourite out of the 3. Anyway I didn’t have much stomach to eat, so maybe it is also a blessing it didn’t come.
After the meal which left some of us bloated (I suspect Jiahao didn’t manage to fill his stomach to the brim) (and I had to loosen my belt), we went to Orchard Cine to watch Feng Yun 2. It was disappointing. Whilst Waikit and Jiahao is leaving the review for another entry, I guess I’ll just go through it briefly since I got nothing much to say.
It was bad. What kind of an abrupt ending was that. Where is the plot? I feel that there is so much slow motion going on that it sacrifices time for story development. How can someone train for a few days and suddenly defeat a more powerful opponent. And according to Waikit, one of the characters who was killed is supposed to be the mother of Cloud’s son. Ok. It just means Cloud’s wife. But you get the point.
So it was horrible.
We also walked at 313 for a while and OC. Orchard Central is a messy area in the sense it is not designed like the traditional mall. It has the normal escalators which visit most stories up to 7. There are also escalators that skip levels, like level 4 to level 7, and level 7 to level 11. There is no down escalators for these two. To go down from 11 to 7, you go down to 10, and wonder where the hell the other escalator is. You end up at the car park, and you walk in only to find another glass door that leads to another escalator. This goes on for 10 to 9, 9 to 8 and 8 to 7.
I guess it was nice walking once.
There’s also a performance at level 1 at 8pm, and I was bored initially, especially with the crowd blocking me. But there were a few interested performances, and overall it was a great half an hour.
We walked to PS for dinner, and then it was time to go home. For the next semester, I wonder if anyone will need to treat again. I guess it is time to explore good quality restaurants instead of buffets.
Today is the day that students in NUS spend countless hours trying to check their results. This never happened before. This time, it took anyone of us hours before we could retrieve our results, thanks to the NUS team shifting all the websites and centralise it as a system called Isis. To log in to Isis, we have to use the Vpn as Isis is probably an intranet in school. The bottle neck is at the stupid Vpn because it couldn’t handle the thousands of students all checking their results when the clock strikes 9, or 10 for FoE blabla and so on for other faculties.
Anyway I managed to check my results earlier because my friends at SoC had the SoC Vpn, and that wasn’t bottlenecked as the rest of us wouldn’t know how to use the SoC Vpn anyway. But that is not the point. This sem was a disappointment, and I probably expected it already anyway.
EE2001 was a rather confusing module in a way that we were given freedom to choose our topics and make them into reality. I would say that throughout the module, my team was great in terms of implementation. We met major deadlines and our project did not malfunction during the presentation. We also saved the school lots of money by using the full budget allocated to us. Hence I was extremely disappointed to get a B+ for this module, which I had originally wished for it to be an A. I cannot describe how disappointed I am, and I think my team mate Feng Fu was also very disappointed as he came to ask me my grade for EE2001. We put in a lot of effort, even more than I would say 3/4s of the teams there, and we tried our best to debug and implement the entire thing.
EE3408, another B+, was rather expected. I feared getting worse results, so B+ is probably a sigh of relief. I couldn’t grasp the concepts of the design project, and I guess the way the module was carried out wasn’t entirely good. It isn’t easy to understand how to proceed on for the design project, and I couldn’t meet the specifications even when I tried my best. I guess CMOS design isn’t really my cup of tea.
ACC1002X, a B-, was expected. How can you score for a module when your project mates are such assholes? Lazy people that don’t meet deadlines and don’t produce quality work. And a freeloader who don’t do anything. Volunteers for formatting but the end result is such a disaster that you have to do the formatting yourself. You, the one that does most work, got arrowed to bind, print and submit the report. How can anyone score for this kind of shit work? Naturally, I will be converting this B- to an S.
EE2007, an A, was expected. I put in a lot of effort on both the mini project as well as the major project, spending countless hours at home and countless hours on wednesday and friday in school debugging the program and making it look good. At least the effort paid off. I also studied hard for the final paper and although I didn’t understand a question until after the exam (it only contributed 3% of the final marks), I felt that I could sacrifice it and still get a decent grade.
EG2401, an A-, was above expectations. I expected a B+ for such essay modules, but I guess hard work manage to pay off itself. How else do you justify doing all 4 papers and discussing them in depth with friends just to try to get as much points as possible? It being an essay question mean you need to write the essay within the time frame given. Your whole hand gets numb after a while because you wrote too much and there was never a need to write like that for engineering modules.
Lastly GEM2900. I was sick that day. I started leaking (or rather, my nose did) when I went into the hall. I finished my tissue and I had to go to the toilet to get toilet paper to sneeze into. I didn’t expect to do well. I was slow and sluggish and my head couldn’t think fast. I took 2 hrs to finish the paper when I probably needed 1 hour and slightly more. But all is well and I actually got an A+ for it. I guess I am very happy with it because I was expecting to S/U it.
Overall I asked myself, if given more time, could I have done better? I doubt so. I did not score lousily for my paper. The parts that brought me down were the project components. For EE2001 it was unexpected. It is also 6MCs so it is painful. I have no idea why I got a B+. I think I deserve at least an A- for my efforts and standard of work. For EE3408, the whole design project was confusing in the way it was carried out by the department. Could I have done better? I guess not. I couldn’t get the idea on how to design. It seems to be a very trial and error method to meet the specifications. I didn’t really learn much on practical designing from the project.
So whilst I am disappointed, I think I did my best. There was nothing else to fault. And I think many people would kill me for my grades anyway.
I obtained the following 45 life lessons from an email a friend sent me, and I thought it would be good to add in my own comments and ideas about them:
Written By Regina Brett, 90 years old, of The Plain Dealer, Cleveland , Ohio
“To celebrate growing older, I once wrote the 45 lessons life taught me.
It is the most-requested column I’ve ever written. My odometer rolled over to 90 in August, so here is the column once more:”
1. Life isn’t fair, but it’s still good.
No one can get the same thing as everyone else. No one can achieve the same success with different amount of efforts. Look, communism was about sharing and everyone having the same things. People working together for the common good but look what it has become now. Even in communism, different levels of social class exists.
2. When in doubt, just take the next small step.
3. Life is too short to waste time hating anyone.
We may spend some time being angry at a person, but most of the time there is nothing that serious to hate anyone. Even if we dislike someone, we will just forget about the person, and we don’t waste time hating him/her.
4. Your job won’t take care of you when you are sick. Your friends will. Stay in touch.
Probably your friends will show care and concern, but they won’t take care of you. Your spouse will. I just watched a drama where they recited the wedding vows today. I got a deeper understanding for the words “for poorer, for richer” as well as whether one is healthy or sick, that they should stick by each other. I guess, this is what getting married is about.
5. Pay off your credit cards every month.
I couldn’t agree more. Bringing credit cards to the next month incurs interest charges. Credit card companies are earning money doing nothing except allowing you to pay it off later. A little interest here and there and you can buy something new after some time.
6. You don’t have to win every argument. Agree to disagree.
This is something I learnt over the years of blogging. There will always be people with different views. Even when you exhaust all your energy trying to convince them and be polite, there will always be people who disagree and try to make your life miserable. So agree to disagree. Surprisingly, I realize that with time, I still get proven right for some ideas I had.
7. Cry with someone. It’s more healing than crying alone.
This is something that I have something to voice out. I think crying is a therapeutic event. Hence it is good to cry. People feel better after crying. But why is God so unfair (see point 1 – life is unfair) cause he made it such that men find it hard to cry. Their tears just don’t flow so well. Men can’t feel better and is destined to feel sad. Haha.
8. It’s OK to get angry with God.. He can take it.
9. Save for retirement starting with your first paycheck.
I couldn’t agree more either. With the idea of compound interest, building your retirement in 40 years time is so much more easier than building for retirement in 20 years time. Imagine using lesser money per month. You can enjoy so many more things in life while saving for retirement.
10. When it comes to chocolate, resistance is futile.
Even with ulcers in the mouth, you can’t resist chocolates. Haha. Hate ulcers.
11. Live with the 3 E’s –Energy, Enthusiasm, and Empathy.
This reminded me of something Brian Tracy said. I am not sure if I remembered him correctly, but selling something is a transfer of enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is an infectious thing that affect people around you and gives them energy. I guess empathy is there to ensure that you’ll always try to understand another human being.
12. It’s OK to let your children see you cry.
13. Don’t compare your life to others. You have no idea what their journey is all about.
I agree. Don’t enforce your ideas on other people unless you can help them change for the better. Sometimes, ideas are better left with – agreeing to disagree (point 6)
14. If a relationship has to be a secret, you shouldn’t be in it.
Well. Sometimes it is inevitable, but it is hard and painful. It is always a form of agony to constantly need to hide from people and lie to cover up a relationship.
15. Everything can change in the blink of an eye. But don’t worry; God never blinks.
16.. Take a deep breath. It calms the mind.
17. Get rid of anything that isn’t useful, beautiful or joyful.
18. Whatever doesn’t kill you really does make you stronger.
Isn’t it. Think NS. It didn’t kill me but made me stronger. I look back at my failures with pride, I look back at my 2 years with pride. No one should come and tell me that NS is a waste of time because it isn’t for me.
19. It’s never too late to have a happy childhood. But the second one is up to you and no one else.
I guess everyone of us has a 2nd childhood that lasts through life. We only show this side of us to the people we are close to, because deep down we are children at heart and we don’t want to be too serious.
20. When it comes to going after what you love in life, don’t take no for an answer.
21. Burn the candles, use the nice sheets, wear the fancy lingerie. Don’t save it for a special occasion. Today is special.
Kinky.
22. Over prepare, then go with the flow.
This reminds me. What is luck? Luck is preparation meeting opportunity. Prepare to the best, and go with the flow and wait for an opportunity. Create your own luck.
23. Be eccentric now. Don’t wait for old age to wear purple.
Hence don’t care about what other people think, especially if it makes you miserable.
24. No one is in charge of your happiness but you.
Find your own happiness, and try to make it work. Don’t think that happiness is something that your partner gives you. It is something you create when you do something with your own effort.
25. Frame every so-called disaster with these words ”In five years, will this matter?”.
26. Always choose life.
27. Forgive everyone everything.
28. What other people think of you is none of your business.
Like point 23.
29. Time heals almost everything.. Give time, time.
I agree. With time, you forget unhappy things. Even if you get lousy results, you end up having success in other areas after some time. Then why would the lousy results matter? Time also heals all emotional wounds.
30. However good or bad a situation is, it will change.
31. Don’t take yourself so seriously. No one else does.
32. Believe in miracles.
Miracles are something you create yourself.
33. God loves you because of who God is, not because of anything you did or didn’t do.
34. Don’t audit life. Show up and make the most of it now.
35. Growing old beats the alternative — dying young.
36. Your children get only one childhood.
37. All that truly matters in the end is that you loved.
38.Get outside every day. Miracles are waiting everywhere.
39. If we all threw our problems in a pile and saw everyone else’s, we’d grab ours back.
We never would know what problems others are facing. For all you know, your problems, though it may seem like the end of the world, is actually the least problematic problem compared to your friends’.
40. Envy is a waste of time. You already have all you need.
41. The best is yet to come.
Sounds like some ACS thing, but I guess so. It is only the best “till now”. In the future you may become better.
42. No matter how you feel, get up, dress up and show up.
43. Yield
44. Life isn’t tied with a bow, but it’s still a gift.
45. Your Inner most is always happy. So, be happy.
I went on a holiday to Sydney from the 8th December 2009 to 13th December 2009, a total of 6 days. Actually the holiday only lasted about 4.5 days since the first day was a flight on SQ221, an A380 plane, at after 2000 hours. On the last day, at 5pm Sydney time (2pm Singapore time), I flew back on SQ222, another A380 plane.
The first day, my family and I took a taxi down to Changi Airport Terminal 3 for our long anticipated holiday. This holiday was much awaited because I was thinking about it in the middle of my examinations. We went to have Ya Kun Kaya Toast for a snack, and I had half boiled eggs with coffee. Soon we walked about in Terminal 3 before meeting up with the tour leader to check in our luggage.
We then proceeded into the customs area, where we went to walk around and I ended up buying a pair of Pedro shoes because it was GST free. Anyway, the A380 plane was a nice experience. I can’t see much difference in the seat size since I don’t travel often, and the changes are pretty minimal anyway, but it is big enough for me and my feet can stretch all the way to the front and just nice touch the metal part of the seat in front. I think this is probably one of the plus points?
The screen size on all Singapore Airlines flight has also been upgraded and it is a joy to watch movies on the trip. I only got to watch two movies because somehow for that flight, triggering the games causes the entertainment system to hang. I watched Gokusen The Movie as well as G Force. The plane is also decorated with the Christmas theme.
Anyway the food on the plane was good, Chicken with Potatoes and ice cream for dessert. It’s a cone, and not Haagan Daaz that I had when I was in secondary 2 on the way back from Japan. Nonetheless it was a great meal. After that there was also breakfast in the form of muffin and pastries.
This concludes the airplane journey down to Sydney. I will be posting some photos for the rest of the journey, and am now in the middle of uploading photos to Facebook. So check out my facebook page to see the photos. 
Just yesterday at my JC clique outing, we were talking about one of us who have been attached for 6 plus years. We were all quite envious of his “luck” or ability to find a soul mate. In the middle of the conversation, we suddenly went on to talk about how young couples must register a flat 3 years in advance before getting married, because that is how long a HDB flat takes to build. So we think that if he wants to get married at 26 (I don’t know when he wants to), it means he need to register now at 23. For the rest of us singles, we have to wait till 35 before we can buy a Singapore HDB flat. The reality can be really vicious when you’re a single.
Fortunately, if anyone is itching to have his or her own house, there’s still the resale market. You won’t get the HDB subsidy, but at least there’s a chance to buy your own house if you’re rich enough. However, finding a house isn’t an easy feat. Where should anyone start from? Once again, technology comes to save the day in the form of an all in one portal to buy real estate in Singapore. ST701 deals with a variety of stuff, and one of them is property in Singapore.
When you have so many listings in the newspapers, you have to go through them one by one and circle those property that you are interested in, just like how the dramas portray the jobless, by circling the relevant job advertisements. But in this technological age, it makes no sense to do such manual work when we can save time by streamlining it down to things we want. You want houses at Boon Lay? Why look at Pasir Ris? You want Condominiums? Why look at HDB flats? Sort your data effortlessly with ST701. They even allow you to sort it by a price range and a space range (in sq ft), number of bed rooms, and whether it is for rent.
But what I really like is that they also feature articles on the property market. There is also the property price trend graphs for those who are visual people. There are actually many different things you can do on the website, and I think it is important to go through some material there so that we are all aware and will be less ignorant about real estate matters. Only then we can choose a good deal for ourselves.
So bookmark this website now @ http://property.st701.com/. You may need it sooner or later!
