too full to study so here i am...

it's very hard for me to do anything on a full stomach except watching tv and using the computer. just don't like to study when i can still feel the tightness in my stomach. haha.. so i decieded to blog for a while. will study a bit soon especially since i have to wake up early tmrw. have early lessons and stuff.

finally played DOTA at home yesterday. it was a nice feeling to play it for FREE. well ok not actually free. i did pay some money to get the CDs in the first place. but at least yesterday's session chalked off about $2.50 from my fixed costs because in those computer cafes, it costs $2.50 an hour to play on the internet. hope to make a profit.. but it need not be soon haha..i better not be making a profit before the exams cos that would have meant i played for quite a number of hours!!

but during the hols i'll be sure to make a profit REAL quickly.. i can already picture it in my head.. rushing home everyday after, perhaps, working at my hol job to start the next game of DOTA. probably would have been map 9.99 by then haha.. (sorry to non DOTA people who didn't understand that joke)

well i am not too worried about getting addicted. as long as i realise that losing a computer game is a million times better than failing a subject, I am sure i will set my priorities right. besides i really dun mind losing. i hardly play anyway so what do i expect? haha

guess playing games is like a vicious cycle... the more you play the better you expect to be which means you cannot accept defeat as graciously as before. and that compels you to "train" even harder so that you won't lose as much which means playing even more frequetly than before.. and so the cycle continues. because there is always going to be one guy better than you.

the only way to break out of that cycle is to get some rude awakening of how badly the rest of your life has detoriated thanks to computer games. all the time you were addicted to games, your parents were just people who gave you money, school was a place you had to show your face in and friends were just stealing time away from your next battle. it can be very de-humanising or de-socialising.

so maybe i should re-think my holiday gaming plans. i better stick to 3 times a week during hols then... or else i fear by the time the hols end, i would be more eager to learn some new hero than to keep my degree...

disciplined life here i come

with my computer my only source of entertainment from now on, it should be easier to do alot more work now. going to stop taking it easy and start picking up the pace a little. i have neglected my HR group project. hopefully will make some headway with that this week.

I now am the proud owner of warcraft 3 and frozen throne. which means i should be able to play DOTA on battlenet for FREE. let me emphasize that word again. F.R.E.E.

who knew going to lan shops could be so expensive? well hopefully i will be able to play the occasional DOTA, save money in the process and still keep my grades up. i know that if with God's help, I can stay focused on the academics. furthermore, i just got a bit of inspiration from my friend today. she pointed out that if i worked hard for just a few more months, God willing, I could get a nice reward. so feel more motivated to study now.

nice way to end

well it's finally here.. the dreaded FOURTH WEEK!!

why is it so dreaded? because i decided to impose this rule on myself. after the 4th week i shall not go out after church on sundays. and i cannot go out on weekdays. even if i do go out on saturdays it's only for special reasons like birthdays, post-test celebrations or i'm just too darn sick of studying...

but at least it ended in a nice way. spent some good time playing 3 DOTA games with my church friends. they are by far the best group i've played with. not because we win (on the contrary...) but because they are just such nice people i dun mind losing to or losing with them.=)

felt a bid disappointed ( and yes insulted) that i lost all 3 games to strangers but after i found out that they took part in some national competition i realised they were expected to trash me anyway and i didn't feel so bad. haha

i miss those JC days when i could call my friend and we could chat for hours on end. that's all i ever want in a friend actually. and of course all the more so for future gf/wife. I love to talk and i do enjoy listening. so as long as we strike a good long conversation, chances are i would like to continue having you as a friend.

now i dun have anyone to call. it feels a little strange. right up till army, chatting on the phone was my favourite source of de-stressing or, just simply, having fun.(in army, it was more towards de-stressing and trying to salvage some semblance of a civilian life)

although it's been 2 years since i've enjoyed the luxury of a "chatting buddy", i still miss it. i feel weird calling that chatting buddy again. we've both been so bz it's hard to even meet up let alone talk on the phone for hours.

never noticed that i stopped talking till recently. guess it's cos for the 1st time, i had little to
do so far so i get bored sometimes at night when there are no games to play and i've already surfed all the soccer websites.

yesterday was the worst. i finished work at around 11 and i thought a nice chat on the phone till 12 would have been the perfect reward for my hard work(so-called). but who could i call? my good friend is busy and the rest i am not close enough to just call for no good reason

so i ended up smsing 2 people haha... i knew that there was a good chance i won't get a reply but well, it felt good to just sms out my thoughts to someone. it felt.. sincere..

even when it's just a sms.

study day!!

before i start blogging away, i think i need to make one point: actually being happy is not the be all and end all of life. of course it'd be nice to be happy but realistically that's impossible. what's more impt is to be true to yourself or in my case God whatever the situation. so yup i'm not bothered by the fact that I didn't feel particularly happy a few days ago.=)

anyway, today is saturday and it HAS to be study day. I played the whole night yesterday and i'll be out the whole day tmrw so i have to study hard today. the difficulty in trying to study hard is

1. you need to find things to study quick or inertia will start to creep in
2. you need to have frequent breaks yet make sure the breaks don't drag on forever
3. studying is seldom fun...

i do think ( warning: nerdy sentence coming...) that studying can actually be fun at times. but lately that has rarely happened.

as for point number 2, I have discovered that the computer is the perferct source for breaks. with the computer, i can either blog, surf the net, watch videos, check emails, surf more net etc. and it can't take more than 30 mins. whereas with the xbox, 30 mins is never enough. furthermore, even if i was disciplined enough to stop at 30mins, no one would believe me.. haha.. everytime i play xbox my dad seems to give this long sigh even if it's just for half an hour... for the sake of his mental and physical health and the fact i love him dearly, i have stashed away my xbox controllers. for me, out of sight is REALLY out of mind.

speaking of that, i had been out of sight with some friends till recently. went out with them yesterday. i hardly go out on fridays. but for them i made the exception. they are my jc friends and while it's obvious that i speak alot more english and alot less chinese than them, we stil get along rather well. after 6 years of knowing them, even the most jia-katang person like me can appreciate and enjoy their company. we went to this cafe called "settler's cafe" quite interesting cos the purpose is not to eat but to play all sorts of board games and card games you've never heard of before. (the catch is that if you decide to play without eating you only pay slightly less than if you play AND eat so most people end up eating too..smart marketting i must say..)

anyway, the concept was great but unfortunately the mood was spoilt by our neighbouring table that to be frank sounded more like a fish market than people playing games. maybe that game was to test who could shout the loudest because everyone at that table was shouting and screaming. i guess they were having so much fun they forgot about the surroundings. while our mood was spoilt a little, the game we played was still kinda fun...so all was not lost.. next time we'll go real early and sit at some corner far away..

ok time's up.. shall study till lunch...have to finish all my tuts, my presentation and study for a class test..and maybe i can file up my notes too..it's not that i'm a workaholic.. it's just that i feel guilty too easily.. 2 days of play without any work to "pay" for it?!

HOW CAN?!!! haha...

got back my phone and a little happiness too...

spent a good 2 hours or so (or should i say wasted) travelling to plaza singaupra to get my phone back. i was just slightly anxious to get my phone back cos i was expecting an impt sms to come in. but that never materialised...then again, think everyone knew my phone spoilt so maybe no one tried to sms me haha.

and that made me a little happy. today i found out my friend does read my blog cos she knew about my hp. that was kinda nice..another friend who is super busy also asked me about my phone which he could only have known about through my blog.. it's always nice to know that a friend is reading your blog. i don't think people are very very free. there's always some other thing they could have done instead of reading my blog. so the fact my blog does take some priority in their life is kinda cool and rewarding.

all a blogger wants is for his friends to read his blogs. if i blogged purely for self-expression, i would have wrote a diary instead haha..

my friend told me my blogs are rather long.. hope that means you like them? haha... how about the rest, length of blog ok?

anyway, i thought i'd blog about food court aunties today.. you know those aunties who clean up the tables and help wash the dishes you leave behind at the food court. i was looking at them working as i ate alone at plaza sing's kopitiam and it suddenly occured to me that food court aunties behave just like those vultures you see on discovery channel.

why? because both keep circling round and round until you finish eating. once you leave, they swoop in, encircle the leftover food and the next thing you know there is not a trace of food left. haha..

true ain't it? if i was the boss of those aunties i would be proud of their high enthusiasm

"why so sian?"

that's what everyone has been asking me today. it seems like I looked really tired or depressed today. ever so often, I would be talking to my friend when suddenly he would say "why so sian? everything ok?" and i have to agree. i really do look sian today. i even feel a little sian. but the funny thing is i can't really explain why.

i figured it's because i woke up real early today. Although my handphone alarm went off at 8am, i normally actually begin to wake up at only 9 or even 10am. however, i was shocked out of my bed when i noticed my handphone's screen was just white all over. i couldn't see a thing on my screen! i spent the next hour trying to fix it on my own, giving up and then finding out where i should go to get it repaired. waking up much earlier than expected only to have waste time going to a repair shop was certainly not the best way to start a day. but normally that doesn't make me sian. i don't even remember being irritated by this inconvenience. i guess it was because i was already mentally prepared to send it to the repair shop. for some time now, my handphone has been giving me a bit of trouble now and then. sometimes i find it impossible to charge it, other times one of my features does not seem to work. so perhaps at the back of my mind, i was actually happy i finally had to force myself to go to the repair shop. further back in my mind, i am of course upset that i spent so much money for a lousy phone but that has been covered up by the many happy memories of me taking nice photos with it. so oh well...

back to the original question. why am i sian? perhaps it's because i was a little let down by today's outing. the previous outings were so perfect and so fun that i had high expectations for this outing too. while there was fun and laughter, i just felt that something was missing. but that isn't right either. from what i could remember, today's outing really should be graded on the same level as the others. if you just think about the content and what happened, it really should be the same. ok granted, now that school has started, people are starting to have other worries on their minds which may effect the fun a little. but i do recall that for the better part of the outing, we were able to just crap as always. and of course i'm happy my present was well appreciated. guess the end was the only slighlty sad point because at the end, i suggested meeting up every monday. unfortunately that suggestion was greeted with " we'll see how.." hmm...a rather neutral statement.. guess i should just look on the bright side as i always do: at least it's not negative right? =)

i guess the real difference is just me. maybe there's some happy part of my brain that decided to switch off today.

or maybe, as i said all along, i just woke up too early.. haha..

handphone under repair pls dun contact me for now

my handphones' decided to rebel against me this morning. sending it for surgery later. in the meantime, till i say otherwise, dun contact me ok? watch this space for more updates

actually it'll be a rather fun social experiment to see if a typical singaporean can survive without his handphone. i got a bad feeling i can't though.. haha

the only reason i would want a PDA

it would be good to have a PDA because i would be able to blog about my thoughts while they're still fresh in my mind... i had at least 2 ideas for blogs today but for some reason i can't remember what they are anymore. maybe that's why people blog so little. not because they have nothing to blog but because they forgot what they wanted to blog about

anyway i noticed that we seem to live in a society that will always be full of complaints. i think every minute or even second, somewhere there is someone complaning about something. (haha)

even i am guilty of being a complainer at times. complaining is never good. complaining is basically ranting on about some injustice or unfair thing without hearing the other side's perspective. it is so easy to assume we must be right and that we've already given it a good thought. but isn't it common to find that someone else has a totally different point of view? and more importantly, that point of view makes you realise that what you thought
was an injustice was actually perfectly logical.

there is a difference between complaining and giving negative feedback. the difference is that with negative feedback, we give the person a chance to explain himself. in the event that his explaination is flawed, we should then point out his mistakes. just because it's negative doesn't mean the feedback can't be constructive. obviously, nobody likes to hear that they made a mistake. but once the initial disappointment and regret are out of the way, you would learn from it and become a better person. nonetheless, just as a secondary point, we should not criticise people with low self-esteems too much. that may end up being counter-productive.

i am striving to complain less and listen more. it's never easy but at least i should make a start. oftentimes, i'll be pleasantly surprised to hear that i was wrong about him.

when that happens, it's one of those few times i'm actually glad to be proven wrong.

hello

not sure what the title of this blog should be so just came up with some abritrary title.

it turns out that the blog i wrote yesterday about the bus seat syndrome may be published in my engineering magazine. my editor needed an article to fill up a remaining page and i had just wrote that blog so i thought why not give that blog to him to take a look? and happily enough, he thought it was good.

but then came the tedious process of finding the right photo to go along with the article. photographs of buses aren't exactly the most exciting photos around so there were few photos to choose from on the internet. furthermore, there's the issue of copyright infringement so we couldn't use just any photo. on top of that, we had to find a photo that was large enough, both in size and resolution, to be printed out. so you can see why i spent a whole hour to find a photo for him but to no avail.

in the end i brought my digi-cam along for today's bus journey and, at the right discrete moment, i clicked away. hope the shots were good enough though.

i am trying to stamp out my bad habit of leaving "..."s all over my blog. it doesn't make any sense really. i am not trying to drag out the sentence. rather, the "..." is just my way of killing time while i think of the next sentence to write. haha...

feeling super hungry now. starch is a terribly evil food. it leaves you full after you've only had a couple of bites of it but it leaves you totally empty just a few hours later.

but what would you know? my mum's just returned with my dinner! haha.. going off to eat now.. ciaoz

bus seat syndrome

i'm sitting on those standard 2 seaters in a bus on yet another long journey home. i sit next to the window so there's an open space for someone else to sit next to me.

i sit next to the window because i like to lean my head against the window and also because i feel bad if i sit on the outside as that is like "blocking" the inner seat. you know how it is like: if someone sits on the outer seat of the 2 seater, you are lazy to squeeze past him just to get the window seat right?

however, i always prefer to have private space, even if it's just a few centimetres inside a public bus. so naturally, as i'm sure you would all agree, i prefer if nobody sits next to me..

it's interesting to note that if there was another totally empty 2 seater available and yet someone decides to sit next to YOU in your 2 seater, you would find it weird right? i still remember a time when this rather pretty girl, for some reason, decided to sit next to me when there were other empty 2-seaters to choose from. i cheekily thought she was trying to pluck up the courage to ask me out.. muah haha... ( hey she DID look in my direction quite often ok? =P)

anyway i digress. naturally i would prefer to have the whole 2 seater to myself. it's always uncomfortable to have someone next to you. after that, no matter what, you feel at least a tad more self concious right?

so everytime someone boards the bus i hope they sit somewhere else.. and there are times when people just seem to keep ignoring your seat.. they sit everywhere else but next to you..

at first i'm happy that i kept the seat to myself.. but after the 8th or 9th time this happens, i start to wonder " how come nobody wants my seat? is there somethign wrong with my seat that i'm not aware of? "

so now i start hoping someone sits next to me.

but maybe i looked too desperate.. cos after that, everytime someone boards the bus, i will give them this " hey there wanna sit here?" look.. and that only scares them away...

so after a while, i decide that actually people are free to choose which seat they want.. it has nothing to do with how bad my seat is.. sometimes things like this just happen..

so now i'm fine either way... if people want to sit i'm happy to oblige but if not no big deal..

and as is so often the case, the moment you are comfortable with your own seat and stop caring about what other people think of your seat, someone sits next to you..

unfortunately that someone is some grumpy 40 yr old chinese auntie that keeps mumuring some weird language under her breath... you wonder if she's complaining about life or chanting some ancient spell...

i'm not sure if anyone else has experienced such a situation or felt the same way as i did but i have a funny feeling you would agree with me... we always start to think about whether something's wrong with us only after we see everyone else getting something we don't have, when we forget that actually we never wanted it in the 1st place.. trying to force it to happen doesn't help either. while, certainly, the environment can change your perspective on things it doesn't do anythign to change the outcome until you know what you really want for yourself.

it's not about whether all the other seats are taken.. it's about whether you are comfortable with your own seat even if it stays empty forever... and whether you are really ready to let someone sit next to you..

haha...

the similarities of NUS and the english premier league

the season has just started.. there's a buzz in the air. after a long break, players are starting to get themselves fit again for the hustle and bustle. in the next few months, people are going to fight for every point and try to outwit and outplay each other. at the end of the season everyone will shake hands and congratulate the winners, sympathise with the runners-up and pity the losers. but while the season is going on, there is indeed everything to play for.

some people have had new additions and there are some new faces. some came back from a one year's loan, training overseas in a sort of exchange program.

alot of people are still lacking match fitness. but just like liverpool, i hope the early preparation will get me back into match fitness soon enough...

our 2 week non tutorial period is kinda like those pre season friendlies.. it's almost come to an end and the real season is about to begin..

come on come on... you'll never walk alone..

1st week slow start...

as is always the case i am experiencing yet another slow start to the study term... it's only the 1st week so there's no need to panic just yet but if this continues for the rest of the term i might as well quit school. after all, either way, i would not be able to get a degree anyway.. haha

it doesn't help increase my sense of urgnecy when i was compelled to stay in school for about 15 hours doing almost nothing... to cut a long story short, i needed to queue up to get a project i wanted. it was on a 1st come 1st serve basis and there were only 20 slots available for a cohort of 300 plus so i couldn't take the risk of not queuing up early for it, especially when i knew alot of people would be willing to queue up for it too. Thank God, things went well and i got my project. There were alot of other projects up for grabs too so almost everyone who queued up early was able to get the project they wanted. the only setback was that the queue started at 6pm yesterday while the counter only opened at 9am this morning...think national day parade tickets.. haha

i certainly do not blame the dept head for thinking of such a system... obviously, if this system was not used, i would rather go through the balloting system than have to spend 15 hours on the school floor. but my head was trying to give everyone a chance to show how interested they are in the project which i agree is a key factor in the success of any project... so i have to respect him for looking out for us.. and during the stay over, a lecturer brought us free packet drinks so that showed they really had our welfare in mind...

unfortunately any good intention normaly comes with a price and now i feely slightly groggy again... i had just recovered from the oweek hangover so this is a little like taking a step back but at least i didn't have to cheer haha

trying to convince my body to pick up the notes to study... but i can't so as is always the case i am going to blog again because making the effort to think of proper english sentences normally does help to warm up my brain a little.

oweek is about to come to an end. it was officially over a week ago but being in the committee, i knew that there would be other post 0week things to do. However i can sense the beginning of the end. people are starting to concentrate on other things like studies, other CCAs and girls/boys (haha)

anyway, that was my 1st time orgainsign something on such a large scale invloving easily 400 people. considering the limited resources we have, i think that despite the last minute changes forced upon us we did really well.. kinda hope we can win best committee but we'll see... i used to think we were very well prepared but in the end i guess there are just some things we cannot predict...especially the weather... but if you ask me, from the committee's point of view, the way we managed to respond to those unforeseen circumstances only proves how well the committee is doing.. but i can understand why from the freshie's point of view, other activities seemed more well-run...oh well...

speaking of points of view, it would be nice to know how other people think... cos it's one thing that always makes me frustrated... i realise i can't read people's minds but i find it so difficult sometimes to understand how some people can behave in certain ways... i would like to understand their own perspectives or their own unique situations because then i would know why they would be willing to do something i could never agree to... it would help to broaden my mind and make me more sympathetic i'm sure... but it's not as if i can just go up to people and say " so why are you doing this anyway?" .. guess it's one of those things i have to just let go

sorry been bz

school's orientation has kept me very busy and now school has started again... time sure flies..

well, i should be blogging more often for now on since i only have studies to think about.. though i would prefer to have other things to do too.. haha

anyway, nothign much to say except that as and when i see something interesting you'll be sure to read about it and even view it thanks to my camera phone..

meantime, happy viewing the older pics for now and stay tuned.. more blogs should be coming soon...