Full of Hope: It's 2008!

Well, it's been long time since I last blogged. Welcome back guys and yeah, it's the beginning of the new year.

Thrown a little party at my house; gathered with closest and dearest friends, pouring Moët & Chandon (thanks William, we missed you) and let them abuse my DJ software. Must post the photos later.

There are so many things I wanted to write about; just that I don't have time to come here/login and start writing. I have my THEC (Teaching in Higher Education Certificate) essay to finish, tons of other craps to do but hey, it's new year, so why not give myself a little break today eh?

Meanwhile, I found really funny (and not so funny for kids though) names (probably for pornstars).

Males:
Ben Dover (the winner)
Dick Nasty(!)
Max Hardcore
Erik Everhard (mmmfff... hihi)

Females:
Boo D. Licious
Veronica Castro(!)
Pochahontas ("rumble in the jungle")

So what’s next “O’sana Been Laiddown” or “So'damn Hu'insane”?

Homer Simpson: - “Homer Simp... ehm... Max Power.”
Trent Steele: "Well, hey great name!"
Homer Simpson: - “Yep, I found it on the hairdryer.”

I was touched

Dear Mr Mike

Min ga lar bar! I just would like to say thank you very much for being such a cool lecturer and so far I understand what you taught. I am not sure if I passed the mini test you gave last week. To be honest, I know nothing at all about computers and ironically I do not know why I applied for IT in the first place. In fact, I struggled doing the CARC Case Study project and had quite a hard time doing my part for the project. Thankfully, I have great team members! That said, after learning CARC, I find PCs kind of interesting and I applied what I learnt to everyday life. Well, that is all I have to say. Once again, thanks!

Yours truly


Well, my students have made my day. Greeted me in my mother language too; burmese and "Mingalarbar" means "Hello". I was quite worried that my feedback would not be over 90% (which our diploma goal is 95%; I didn't fulfill last semester).

CARC has been one of the toughest subjects I've taught so far as it's all basics about computers and we assume no prior knowledge of computers for the students. I have been harshed on them; given them a lot of work to do; case studies and quizzes to build up the foundation. Without IT, life would be a mistake, wouldn't it?

Our school renaming towards Informatics & IT also plays a major role on my passion to start relating computers with what we interact everyday; our life. Look around... you will see more and more gadgets intruding into your personal space.

Nevertheless, I was touched by my students; they have made an effort to write to me and made my day. I am truly rejuvenated again. Thank you all and wish you guys all the best on the Term Test.

APCS Crew

Photo (from Left to Right): [Backrow] Shima Rayej, Irving Stern, Martha, Marko Stankic, Diana Seymour, Mike Anderson, Sam Junge, Adam Hiatt, Anil Shrestha [Frontrow] Sarah, Meredith Liu, Chris Echave.

I dug out some photos and found my old APCS (Advanced Placement Computer Science) crew photo. Check out Mr. Stern (Einstein looking guy). Wonder where he is now.

Five Worst Things

Here are five meeting offenses that will not only drive your co-workers crazy, but will also damage your reputation within the workplace.

1. Show up late - Occasionally there is an emergency that crops up that forces you to go into a meeting a few minutes late. But usually the culprit is poor time management. Consistently arriving late implies to your manager and your co-worker that you are either extremely disorganized or don’t really respect the rules that everyone else follows.
2. Bring your cell phone - Again, there could be special circumstances that would require having a cell phone in a meeting, such as a call from a doctor or your child’s school. But if your cell goes off at every meeting and it’s just your spouse needing to know if you’ll pick up some Pudding Pops after work, shame on you. This behavior shows a lack of respect as well as a lack of commitment to your job.
3. Have a side conversation - Nothing rankles a meeting leader more than two people having a whispered conversation separate from the topic at hand.
4. Don’t focus - Believe it or not, I’ve been in meetings when attendees have leafed through clothing catalogs or balanced their checkbook while the leader is talking. Trying to multi-task in a somewhat dull meeting might be tempting, but it’s very rude. And don’t think people don’t notice.
5. Talk just to hear yourself speak - It may be your way of raising your office profile, but hogging much of the meeting spotlight with philosophical ramblings will not do it. Be brief and succinct. Meetings are for communication; they are not your personal stage.

Cited from Tech Republic Blog. Sadly, we all see this in our meetings, especially in Singapore.

Read Exam Answers

Real Exam Answers - no kidding folks.

Question 1: What is high level format?

Answer:















Question 2: What is Parallel Processing?

Answer:















Now you want to blame me for failing them???

Panoramic Shots

Just shooting around my school with my W810i Sony Ericsson Walkman phone. Really need to get a DSLR soon.

(Across from the school)
(Bedok Reservoir as seen from top of the TP's 9 storey library)

(Horseshoe Plaza)

Feasty Mikey

Okay, for those of you who have seen me outside would comment, "so skinny sia". Yep, they're right. I'm standing 179cm with only 68kg on top which is considered underweight (supposed to be 75kg at least). But do not mistaken my looks with my eating habits. Ask my friends around, they'd say I'm like a beast; particularly addicted to rice (high carbo, I know). Anyway, for the past month I've been eating out a lot here and there and I can't seem to stop eating at home either. I make nice cheese and egg pratas at home (with onion flava!) which goes very well with Iced Cafe Mocha, of course, also homemade. So here are the updates on what has been happening to Mike's lunches and dinners (sorry I'm not a morning person, I usually skip breakfast on weekends, believe it or not).

(Cherry, Natasha, Hanyoung, Sean, Me at Villa Bali)

(After the first round -- believe it or not -- damn good butter chicken!)

(So full! Yum Yum!!!)
(Another indian cuisine again. This time was at Holland V with Mark, Therese and Amanda. I had 3 pots of biryani rice!)

Patterns

I'm so obsessed with patterns. Here are some I've taken in the past month.



















Another one
















The first one was taken at Tampines Mall, the decorations on the lift doors. The second one was at the restaurant at the cineleisure.

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?