10 Signs You're a True Blue Singaporean

1. You order chilli with everything
2. You'll find somewhere to shop, even if you're in the middle of a desert
3. You queue for hours (even days!) for a big sale
4. You'd rather enrol in a slimming centre than work out to lose weight
5. You say "lah" a lot ... and you're not even singing
6. You have to be the first in the line at a buffet
7. You know that "Want to buy a house together?" is boyfriend-speak for "Will you marry me?"
8. You say something's "not bad" when it's actually quite good
9. You let your man carry your handbag
10. You "chope" a table at the hawker centre with a packet of tissue paper

Exam matters

My paper had the finals on Wednesday last week. Within two days, we had to finish marking the nearly 200 scripts AND come up with all the statistics AND ERRORS are NOT tolerated whatsoever. What are they thinking? We're robots? I propose an online exam, fully computer based multiple choice questions. What? The "credibility of the knowledge tested on multiple choice exams"? Oh please. Even vendors like Cisco, Microsoft, ISC2 and others are using MCQ as their choice for the "Professional" level exams and they're not cheap; ranging from S$200 to over one grand in some cases (such as CISSP, RHCE, MCSE). And you can't go and say, "Dude, your CISSP is crap". I mean seriously, you're not that dumb to do that right? It's the pain in the ars* to mark, error check, manually enter in the results and generating the results manually. Aren't we supposed to automate all these since we are the school of information technology. Use of IT ease the lives of people but excluding lecturers?

"iROBOT"

"Taking a break, I need a vacation!"

Oh and you haven't seen the amount of paper we had to waste to generate the reports. Why not we do everything online (it's more environmental friendly anyway) and NEA (National Environmental Agency) would appreciate it greatly =)

Usual weekend

Friday evening, called up Kyle and met up around 11 to have dinner. Kyle also roaming around Paragon hoping that the stores will give him 90% late night discount :P Anyway, I end up eating twice; once at Pasta Mania and again at a Macau Restaurant at Cineleisure. The Cream of Chicken pasta was horrific; worst I've eaten in years so I chose to eat the garlic bread and soup only. Kyle said he hasn't seen a horror show in years so we decided to watch 1408 which is supposedly scary. Since we got there late, and it's Friday night, no surprise that 1408 sold out. Have left with no options, we took whatever it had, Dead Silence it is. I think the movie is not scary; just a bunch of sounds and eerie dolls. Half the theater is screaming though when Mary Saw (ghost in the storyline) chasing people and biting off their tongues (ouch!)

"The Iced Coffee was nice"

"Left: Me, Right: Kyle"

Saturday was a trip down to meet up with my friends to do some work (rather playing around though). I was testing out two software for NMS (Network Management System: www.zabbix.com) and Security Monitoring (OSSIM - www.ossim.net) both are free. Alan decided to try out Ubuntu Linux instead of the RedHat clone CentOS 5 so there are a lot of dependency issues for the packages I need to install, such as httpd/apache, mysql, net-snmp, etc. Since I'm so used to "yum" -- an updater on CentOS -- it took me a while to get used to "sudo" and "apt-get" commands (apt-cache to look for specific package names).

"Four Sexy Laptops ;)"

Later we went down to eat dinner. All the hawkers near Bugis have delicious food with a very inexpensive price.

"Sky View from a high rise HDB in Bugis (you can see the DHL balloon)"

"Two Thumbs UP"
"Fried Tofu"

Drool the "Fried Tofu" with very nice Thai Style Sauce. Yum Yum!

Count on me (him) Singapore

He has a vision for tomorrow
We must believe in PM Lee
He has a dream for Singapore
He will succeed
He’s PM Lee
Anything
He wants, he’ll get
If not he’ll give you
One tight slap
Because you see, his father’s you know who
Not Lee Kuan Me
But Lee Kuan (point to the audience...)

Count on him Singapore
Count on him Singapore
Count on him to do his best and more
Together him and minister mentorrr
And don’t go to Taiwan anymoreee...!!!

Don't you love Dick Lee?