Post Prelims Part 3

Posted by HELiX

One of the best events of the year actually worth going to school for - Teachers’ Day!

So if you’re a teacher, Happy Teachers’ Day!

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Comments(0) 1:55 AM 8 August 2008

Post Prelims Part 2

Posted by HELiX

On the following day after Prelims concluded, I had an appointment to get back on my feet. Literally.

For weeks, I have been sitting down in front of a desk, whether is it in school or at home. I was simply occupying all my time with either my studies or the computer, although I did try, quite miserably, to allow more of the former.

Kok and I decided to play some badminton at CCK Sports Complex, along with other sports like Tennis and Table Tennis. Like what we usually do in the past, we invited along the same group of BP-AC friends.

Turned out that we apparently over-invited, and ended up with six people on the day itself. Played badminton for two hours, but it wasn’t such a great game with three-a-side. Law of Diminishing Returns and Internal Diseconomies of Scale if you insist, but shut up.

Then we decided to split up for the next two hours to avoid the problem of overcrowding again. We booked a Tennis court and a Table Tennis table for the following two hours.

I first tried tennis, which was the first time in… I would say, an amazing six years since I last played it properly. Kok and I did try it out last year, but that was after three hours of intensive badminton and we were also faced with bad weather.

I last played tennis when I was a little kid at Primary Six, with my siblings. I wouldn’t call that playing properly in fact, mainly because tennis isn’t really suited to be played at that kind of age. But at least I did put in the effort to try my best.

Of course, it turned out that I suck at tennis. Not as bad as I expected, actually, but I didn’t have a good game at all because the rest I played with were equally as bad, if not worse. The three o’clock Sun was a complete killer and in about forty-five minutes I converted to Table Tennis. The rest followed soon after, leaving the court we paid for to rot away, because none of us wanted a heat stroke.

Table tennis was actually the first game we managed to play properly, because we took turns for one-on-one matches.

Table tennis is a sport I’m quite decent at, but I don’t know why. For badminton, I used to play it almost every bloody day back in primary school, so I turned out to be pretty good, although right now I have lost touch with it. Table tennis was something I picked up somewhere sometime somehow, possibly when my Dad paid over S$200 for the set of table tennis tables he bought six or seven years ago. But I don’t remember playing it much at all, because the length was such that it stretches to fit the dimensions of the living room exactly, and there wasn’t any space for the player to stand at all. I suspect it was all the table tennis sessions I had in the pre-dawn hours whenever we had an overnight stargazing in BP.

What was more impressive is that Shaun’s table tennis ability improved a great deal from previously. And when I say previously, I mean two years ago when I last saw him play.

After four and a half hours of sports, we decided to call it a day and headed back home to bathe… only to meet up forty-five minutes later for a movie and dinner.

It was my unwise decision to watch The Clone Wars for certain reasons. I always liked Star Wars, to the point that I completed the entire painful series of Lego Star Wars: The Video Game on PC a few years ago.

My opinion of the show? Worth the download.

It’s rendered in low-level surface texture, so you won’t get a huge quality loss in watching a downloaded copy. It completely felt like a really long cartoon, about two hours. It just didn’t have the elements of a movie, such that there was no character development and side plots.

Then we went home. I should really move on to Part 3.

Comments(0) 1:14 AM 8 August 2008

Post Prelims Part 1

Posted by HELiX

I always like talking about Prelims because a vast number of the readers of my blog are JC2 students from a spectrum of schools, and rubbing it in that I have already completed my Prelims when they are in the midst of it is something quite entertaining.

Well, that’s just me.

I’m not sure whether I’ve performed up to my own expectations for the Prelims — because I don’t even know what to expect of it. In fact, it’s my first examinations of the year, after I missed the entire Term Exams in March for SSEF. I have almost no idea of my academic standard this year.

I did put in a lot more effort than any other examinations previously, so I should score better, but it just feels weird. In subjects like Economics I think I have greatly improved due to my desperation to pull up the grade by a significant margin. It has never been a subject I could score in. I have maintained my standard in Physics, and I would even say GP, because the latter is a subject which feels exactly same after every examination, but the grades produced can vary quite randomly. And finally there’s the subjects which I didn’t perform well at all, like Chemistry. I somehow went in feeling unprepared even though I did prepare for it, so I couldn’t assure myself of any good grade. Math is different. I was prepared. I took the paper prepared. But somehow I found it difficult as with many others. So I don’t blame myself for it.

That’s pretty much all the review of Prelims I will ever give. I know I can do much better than this, and it’s just a consolation that I’m a guy and therefore I can still rely on A-Levels for my universities applications.

I’m just not up to my academic form yet, and it’s just unfortunate that I didn’t make it in time for Prelims. I’m not really to be blamed, because my entire June holidays, a crucial period to pick the pace for Prelims, was practically burned. On top of all these, with my crazy, hectic schedule for the six months running up to June, I was struggling to keep up with school work for those months. Yet, I absolutely do not regret spending my time on all the things other than studies last year and this. I thoroughly enjoyed and benefitted from them.

Comments(0) 1:01 AM 8 August 2008

Singapore Fireworks Celebrations 2008

Posted by HELiX

This comes really late, but I wanted to get through the ordeal I’ve been through for the past three weeks first. Prelim exams. I’m done with that, but I’m not gonna talk about it for now, so let’s move on.

The last weekend was the Singapore Fireworks Celebrations 2008. Oh yeah, right in the middle of my prelims. But well… I still went anyway. On both days.

Just some background for those living underground okay?

Alright. The Singapore Fireworks Celebrations is an annual event held part of National Day celebrations. It features several local and foreign teams which launch fireworks displays on different nights.

First held in 2004 at Marina Bay, the event was initially known as the Singapore Fireworks Festival. Last year, the festival was renamed to Singapore Fireworks Celebrations. The event cost over S$1 million, and featured 130 varieties of fireworks over two days.

The amount of fireworks used has grown in magnitude over the past three years, from 4,000 rounds used in 2004 to over 9,000 in 2006.

So this year, the two days featured fireworks performances from France and South Korea.

My family went down on both days, but I wasn’t really into capturing the fireworks like every other year because the background for the fireworks wasn’t that great this year, and I’ve got tonnes of fireworks photographs from over the years.

Comments(0) 1:30 AM 8 August 2008

Plans for New Lab Page

Posted by HELiX

Spent quite a bit of my afternoon today drawing up the plans for my new Laboratory@Home page. After a whole lot of thinking, brainstorming and wild imaginations, I’ve got a rough idea of what I should be heading at.

So, like how I always do any of my layouts, it all starts like this…

Main Page:

Category Pages:

Content Pages:

And then I’ve also did some thinking through to decide how I was to go about creating it. So the finer details:

- It will run on Wordpress. Helps as it’ll make things easier to update and post. But don’t worry, it won’t look like a blog. At all.
- It will adopt a dark theme. A dangerous, cool laboratory shouldn’t be light coloured like what I have right now. It’s like asking James Bond to dress like an iPod.
- There will be 8 categories, with some projects overlapping into a few. Wordpress allows this, thank goodness. Namely, High Voltage, Weapons and Ballistics, Pyro, Hacks, Lasers, Electronics, Chemistry and Miscellaneous.

Comments(0) 7:06 PM 8 August 2008

It’s In Him

Posted by HELiX

Comments(0) 3:00 PM 8 August 2008

Pretense

Posted by HELiX

It would appear that Prelims are over, after a gruelling two weeks that saw me face the consequences of mugging fatigue. I did try, perhaps a little too hard, to the point that I couldn’t be bothered to revise on the day before the papers — which was an utterly terrible idea.

Stress is such a bitch. With it amounting to all-time high levels for me over the past few weeks, my face was producing oil like the UAE. And now I have this acne-ridden cheek. Complete bitch.

Prelims are, well, like that. I didn’t do great, hardly anywhere near as well as I wanted to do. What’s done is done, and there’s always A-Levels to rely on. Joys of being a boy and serving the military.

Sure, I have two more papers left - Chemistry and Physics MCQs in the following week - but practically the whole cohort has agreed that they’ve been through enough and it’s about time to enjoy.

And I’ve already started.

For the first night in quite a while, I wasn’t spending the night at home. My family got hit by the pyrotechnics bug again and so we went to catch the Singapore Fireworks Celebrations 2008.

Photos in a while after I load them from the camera, but they were generally poor taken as I really can’t be bothered anymore. It’s getting repetitive.

…

I’ll take a good break from studying for a little while I guess. My grades are being affected in a negative way, in fact, because all the constant work wasn’t that helpful especially when it runs down your stamina before the real examinations itself.

So, to begin, I’ll work on this website a bit.

Oh yes, I wanna do a Version 4.

This particular layout and design is approaching its one-year anniversary now, and I’m also starting to see so many eye-sores in what I previously thought was a flawless skin.

But I think the main page would have to wait for a bit. The current one took me two full weeks of work, and I don’t think my break can last that long. And I don’t have the luxury of focusing on designing the new layout in my free time as I have other fun plans as well.

So I’ve decided to just work on my lab page and make it really good this time. It will break off from the design of the main page and other pages, unlike what I have now currently. That’s right, it will have a design on its own.

And I’ll do a lot of random weird stuffs, perhaps some bit of sports as well through the holidays, because I’ve been sitting on my ass for the past few weeks. The workload during this phase of a JC2 student can really make you into Jabba the Hut.

Comments(0) 11:00 PM 8 August 2008