Is Monday the last hurdle to freedom? Seemingly yes, but maybe not. Angst, anxiety, regret and disappointment will prevail for some even as the JC1 Promotional Exam comes to a close. Seeing months of continuous effort, dedication and hard work being put to test, one would certainly want to eventually savor the fruits of labour. However, thee who expects the outcome to be just purely, immensely sweet may want to step back and think again.

I can certainly safely say that I know much clearly about my studies now. CA score has shot up drastically (in one case, Physics, has gone from a U to a B).

Even so, it's not going to help when the papers are all killer papers. Especially for Mathematics. Having lost 39 marks in total, I'm possibly only able to garner a B at maximum. That's after doing more than 2000 questions for Mathematics (~300/topic). How ridiculous. Add Economics and KI to the equation and you'll get more damage.

Despite all these setbacks for now, I hold no regrets. Every last drop of effort has been put into this exam... Of course not forgetting the bittersweet experiences of staying back every single day till 7 pm to purely just study.

Blame it on my foundations. My lackadaisical attitude at high school certainly contributed to my close approach to death for the block tests.

The last hurdle is near. But we're not even close to the finish line.

Back when promos end. Good luck everyone! This is the last lap.

Weekends are finally here :D

Quite a long list of things have happened since the last post. PW, academics (as usual), CCAs. Explains my absence from my blog for the past 1 1/2 weeks.

Yes. Love Warning letter from MOE. Apparently, 9 out of 13 guys (my Malaysian batchmates) also received the same hairdryer treatment. The girls didn't do as badly as us, I think. Not exactly hairdryer lah. But for me, it's more like getting my priorities right - dropping whatever leftover CCAs or external activities and focus primarily on mugging. To others who fell into the same pool - jiayous for promos! :D we shall mug and mug and mug and own promos. :D on another note. some of us got compulsory self-study sessions EVERYDAY! D: haihhs. meaning that I'll be returning home at like close to 6+ pm every single day.

A-Level SPA examinations were quite alright. The seniors said that this year's format is much easier though. They had to write a 4-page essay or so (?). idk. ahaha. full marks is out of the question, certainly, but definitely hopefully that A has been checked.

PW is being a hindrance to my revision schedule ): but at least I completed my EoM and group project trial - after nights of pia-ing by everyone :P Turned out quite well, but the archival system wasn't ready for live demonstration, unfortunately. That aside, THERE'S STILL KI LIT REVIEW AND WR ):

Haha at least I got a bit of entertainment this week. There's Daniel's A3-sized worshippable poster (laminated and de-motivated poster) as his birthday present. :D

Glad everyone did quite well for Physics test (although many may claim that the paper was easy). There's upcoming Economics and Maths test next week though :S so this weekend certainly isn't any free weekend :X haihhs. But certainly I'll do my best :D 09S60! we can do it! :D

It is 45 days to promos. Jiayouus! :D

I'm not a Singaporean, nor did I attend the National Day Parade at Marina Bay.
So this post isn't going to be about these things... but rather the more random and mundane things that has occurred over the past few days.
Anyway, as a side note, I have decided not to give up my Malaysian citizenship from the very start, although I would at least give back something to Singapore at some point of time.

Friday, 07/08/09
Uhh so. National Day didn't mean a lot except for the extra holiday and the fact that Friday was a half day off.
At least being in PA/AVA allowed me to go to the Auditorium control room, while the rest of the J1s were in the Hall.
That's a benefit as I can do what I like to do :D
Ricky, Huang Huang, Yixin, Joycelyn (the sleepyhead!) and Benjamin were there too!
The J2 seniors were extremely noisy (especially during the Harmonica Band performance).
It was rather clear from the top that most of them just couldn't care less.
Some were playing with their PSPs, handphones, hair or just plain mugging.
Oh well.
The celebration in auditorium ended rather early. Just lasting 2 hours.



There was also an MOE International Scholars' Meeting slightly later that day.
There was a "survey".
It was a form which had 6 boxes in it - strengths, weaknesses, support, resources and 2 feelings (?)
Appeared to be largely the same as the one we did at the start of the year.
I think it was pretty pointless, so much that I just wanted to leave it blank.
Perhaps one more relevant thing is regarding the warning letter.
I'll probably be receiving one due to my stupid U-grade in Physics. :/

Very unfortunately, my laptop decided to murder itself on the same day =.="
This time the thermal sensor was the culprit, it kept reporting that my CPU was at 99 degrees celsius right from the start.
And that caused the hardware to trip itself.
Attempted to repair it but no avail because I didn't have thermal paste with me.
Apparently this laptop is probably reaching its expiry date~
Wai Chew's laptop seems to be also on the verge of destruction as Windows XP takes around 3 - 5 minutes to start each time.

Felt rather unaccomplished at the end of the day as I just slept through :|
It's interesting to note that 12:34:56 07/08/09 happened :D

Saturday, 08/08/09

Went to Sim Lim Square alone to get the thermal paste I required.
Bought a VGA cable to replace the Boarders' Council's spoilt one, apparently the rate of spoilage of VGA cables within the Council is rather high, amounting to roughly 1 cable per 2 months.

I think I would be running out of money soon :/
MOE doesn't want to take into account inflation over the past 5 years ):

Since I was at Sim Lim Square, might as well take a look at what laptops are available currently to replace mine~
I had fun laming the salesperson(s) at various stores, by telling them that "I want a 14-inch laptop which can play Crysis at high settings".
Apparently one of them was rather ignorant, so much that he actually pointed me to a laptop with nVidia GeForce 9300M GS (which is rather low end) :D

Actually I have already chosen my laptop of choice :D
It's an Asus N81Vp (I saw the less powerful Vg model at SLS though), priced at roughly RM4320, after conversion from USD and taking into account delivery charges.
I didn't know importing laptops into Singapore would incur a 7% GST, whereas for Malaysia it's free!
Specs for Asus N81Vp are rather good :D

Intel Core 2 Duo T9600 (2.8 Ghz, 1066 Mhz FSB)
4GB DDR2 SDRAM
ATI Mobility Radeon HD4650 (1GB GDDR3 VRAM)
14" 1366x768 pixels display
1.3 megapixel camera
5 USB ports, 1 eSATA port
2.50 kg with battery

And yes, it can play Crysis at high settings.

Oh by the way, just wanted to say that PW SUCKS D:
especially when the execution of our trial comes *right after* Physics Lecture Tests, which I feel I'm not adequately prepared for.



Time to get back to sleep~ *yawns*

It is 55 days to promos. Jiayouus! :D

Chemistry test just passed.
Made quite a bit of mistakes ><
sienned.
Apparently not much graphs came out, contrary to what was expected.
Ahh. Nevermind. Things have passed.

I sense lots of things coming up, especially for PW.
wished PW had really followed the Projects Competition format.
morning assembly had resumed~

Ms Ooi didn't come today.
At least by organic chemistry concepts got slightly clearer.
now guess what that means :D

my MPTP tutor was great :D
learnt lots of things already.
he taught me SMTP math stuff LOL :D

one thing I realised about Friends for Sale:
it teaches people to treat others as a means to an end! :P
probably it isn't a good game after all~
ahahas. KI people will understand this more.

It is 63 days to promos. Jiayouus! :D

Xsite Finals was great :P szh was sick though - so he didn't go in the end =( the organizers didn't allow us to substitute Jay into the team, so it was quite a blow for us. Yeah - so in the end we didn't win - RJC and Dunman High beat us. Means Hwa Chong now needs to make up for a score deficit in NIC.

Chemistry class test was okay. It wasn't counted anyway. At least I got a decent looking score. Lecture test coming up on Monday, so shall continue to study for Chemistry :X PW is being a bane in this period of time. Rahhs.

It is 64 days to promos. Jiayous! :D

This week wasn't any particularly interesting week - especially after all the results have been known and finalized. There is still a fair amount of catching up and pia-ing to do though.

I participated in Xsite - a National Infocomm Competition jointly organized by Singapore Science Center, Infocomm Development Authority and the Ministry of Education. My team had Wang Zhi (de facto leader :P), Daniel and Zheng Hao. The first round is a poster design competition - themed "Earth Fast Forward". Pretty interesting :D I think our interpretation of the theme was rather okay - the resultant poster was so-so (I made it! :D) anyway - not sure I can pit myself against AEP guys from other schools. Aesthetics only covers 30% of the competition score, hopefully we would do well on the short report and reflections.

There are lots of holes in the timetable this week :P there are a fair amount of absentees throughout the week (including teachers). I heard Ms Genevieve Tan was down with H1N1? o___o and David too =( hopefully they can get well soon. There were lots of scares - Joanne, Ivan and Philemon falling sick...

And there was also Physics SPA mock-test. Meh. Didn't do the last page at all (worth 5 marks! D:). Not enough time la. Or rather, spending too much time trying to hold a pulley onto the retort stand (hahas szh also took a fair amount of time?) and also tying strings (which I suck at). Mao didn't finish as well, I think :X

Results - they suck:

No.	Subject	Mark (%)	Grade	Rank	Percentile
1	Knowledge & Inquiry H2	45	D	16	50%
2	Mathematics H2	42	S	808	23%
3	Physics H2	34.1	U	352	6%
4	Chemistry H2	45	E	673	24%
5	Economics H1	59.9	B	8	86%

FULL OF REDS AND ORANGES.

It is 72 days to promos.

Or 2 months, 10 days
6,220,800 seconds
103,680 minutes
1728 hours
10 weeks

Jiayou! :D

I'm feeling the stress :O

It is 73 days to promos.

Or 2 months, 11 days
6,307,200 seconds
105,120 minutes
1752 hours
10 weeks

Jiayou! :D

The new version of the Athena Faculty Blog has just been uploaded! Please take a look at it here :D



Note for those technically inclined, or curious: The new version of the blog validates as valid XHTML 1.0 (: In addition, it uses "Web 2.0" (so-called) technology such as AJAX via the jQuery JavaScript toolkit. I can answer questions regarding the inner workings of the blog (:

3 block test papers have been returned; seeing the current state of matters, I will need to revise my expectation downwards. Math paper was way far away from what I expected I would get. Well admittedly all of this was due to continued procrastination during the June holidays - I didn't really make the most of the holidays. In fact, I actually only really started to study towards the end of the holidays. What regret. =(



Now things have passed, and there's really no point crying over split milk. The only choice I'm left with is the promos. I should start today. Economics and KI papers have yet to be returned, but these will not be sufficient to salvage my scores. At one point of time I actually considered dropping my commitments such as Boarders' Council, but after some thought, I applied for a study leave instead.

Perhaps it is only now that I have come to the realization that this is no longer high school - the days of scoring > 80 marks, or even > 70 marks are long gone.

It's time to really really buck up.

Last Friday marked the end of Block Tests! :D Um. Maybe not a ":D"... there are still results to wait for. I believe I would get dismal marks for Physics. For other subjects, not too sure, I don't think I would score anything high either. =/ Well well. The BTs have been over for more than 4 days now, so I might as well just chill a little.

Anyway, Tuesday and Wednesday are the "e-learning days" designated by the college. Apparently... well, they replaced sabbaticals in the process. And I think it isn't a good thing. Originally I thought the e-learning system in college is going to be similar to the one we had in high school... but... NOT. Oh and the reason they gave for postponing sabbaticals to after Promos was H1N1 =.=" I think that's hardly even a valid reason lor. Why not postpone BTs then since BTs actually encourage gathering more than sabbaticals do. Think: BTs held in a hall of > 300 people, and sabbaticals in dispersed places with a head count of < 30 people.

Things don't get any better when the e-learning days start, like NAO. Expectant of things like mass MSN discussion and convos, I was proven WRONG -___- In fact e-learning days seem to be nothing more than a veil to conceal a hideous fact: to disseminate masses of homework and assignments to all of us. An evil plan indeed. ):<

Last but not least, thanks feli(cia) :D for allowing me to relax a bit more. I'm stressed >.< rah. piang sleep.

Economics is down, (the dreaded) Chemistry is also down. Uh. Maths and Physics left :D

By the way, sabbaticals have been postponed :(( the school admin seems to have double standards... =| like not postponing blocks but sabbaticals instead. And there's home-based e-learning! In actual fact block tests encourage more crowding than sabbaticals do, since the sabbaticals are carried out in various different venues... Well well. But either way, next week is a week to relax~ :D

Okay, last lap~! :D