BookINBookOUT flyers for Vivace 2010

BookINBookOUT.com is now one of the official sponsors for SMU Vivace 2010, joining the likes of Mentos, Singapore Flyer, Swensen, Cathay, Nescafe, etc.

Because BookINBookOUT is an official sponsor, I get to drop nice nice flyers into the 1700 Vivace 2010 goody bags. But because I am running on a super tight budget and since 99% of flyers get thrown away anyway, I don’t see the reason for doing nice fanciful printing and literally throwing my money away. So I decided to go black and white on regular A4 copy paper.

Here’s a little preview.

So what did I sponsor Vivace? Secret

Can’t sleep

I couldn’t sleep well last night at all, constantly worrying and dreaming that we’ve gotten 6.5 for the presentation. Can I stop stressing myself out?

I really don’t reglect buying iPod touch. Blogging while sitting in the toilet.

Overworked?

During today’s IS101 presentation, I suddenly had a dizzy spell while presenting halfway and practically just hung there for quite awhile.
And with the conclusion of Economics Quiz today, it marks the first time in so long that I finally cleared all my mid-term exams.

Still, there is little to celebrate about. All the final presentations of the projects are coming up, and most important IS101 project, the Individual Project, is due next friday amidst all the other projects.

I hope we did well for today’s IS101, although we did went over the time limit, I thought it was less obvious as our presentation was really packed and we didn’t went over the time limit due to boring content. When we timed ourself in yesterday’s rehearsal, it was within the time limit. Perhaps my part was too long? The ATM slide was added while I was on the way to school today. So perhaps that was the culprit. Sau did interrupted me twice during my presentation to not play the 2 videos due to time, but I made the decision to play it anyway because without it some points would be lost, and my presentation would be “no head no tail”. And I thought it was really rude to interrupt your team mate when he or she was presenting. It looks really bad to the audiences as well, like there is not enough trust in the team for teammates to do the right thing.

Here are some feedbacks by classmates for memory’s sake. So that I can always look back at this and gain more confidence in my future presentations. My current approach at presentations is something I’ve never done before, and being a introvert-al JC student, my presentation skills used to leave much to be desired. With my poor English fluency, I hope I was really able to wrap it up with some refreshing ways to engage the class. To a certain extend, I think I’ve succeed today, although my dizzy spell really interrupted my “zone” when I was doing the presentation and I was not able to fully recover afterwards. All the feedbacks from my previous presentations really helped me alot, which is why I want to archive it here so that I can view them even after the Semester is over. Enough talk, here are the feedbacks.

I like the presentation that Group 7 did
The slides were clear and organised and overally, the group did manage to capture the attention of the audience.
All of them spoke well and were confident. I like how they added humour and visual effects in as it definitely made the presentation more interesting
Content wise, I felt they focused a little too much on the customer’s side.. could have put more focus on the IT processes involved.
I felt Saurabh was quite professional in his delivery. His tone was crisp and clear so it was easy to understand him. His flow of thought was very smooth. Could relax more as his face looks rather strict when presenting. Haha.
Aisya and Wei Kiat did great too, they stood out as both confident and humorous speakers.
Keep it up!

The best presentation i have seen so far.

Great job.. I learnt a lot form you guys! There were so many things i dint know like how the credit card thing works and how phishing works. It was a really awesome insight. I learnt a lot from your presentation! keep up the good, i mean awesome, work.!

Break? What break?

This week is SMU’s mid-term break.

A break? Finally a break? Is that why I am finally blogging properly?

No. I am here to rant.

Lets examine the tasks to be completed this week:
-Prepare answers for LTB Individual Assignment
-Prepare slides and rehearse for IS101 Presentation on IT in Finance Sector
-Study for AS Exam
-Study for Econs Quiz
-As Homework
-CT Project
-LTB Course Materials

And lets examine my schedule this week:
Monday: LTB meeting from 12-4
Tuesday: Mug in school from 11-5
Wednesday: CT meeting from 8.30 to 11.30, LTB project from 12-5
Thursday: IS Project Presentation Meeting from 11 to 2
Friday: Meeting for my upcoming R/C Drift Meet event which I am organising for the school from 6.30pm to 9
Saturday: LTB Project Execution from 2pm to 5pm
Sunday: Prepare for the 2 exams on Monday.

Now, not to mention ongoing assignments that are due very very soon and affect a huge part of the grades
-IS101 Individual Assignment Part1+ Part 2(Proposal)
-LTB Learning Journal 2.

Break? what break? Don’t kid me.

Still, work aside, the lack of quality blog entries in recent weeks is disappointing. I love to blog, but I simply couldn’t find time to do it. I used to blog to exercise my writing skills which eventually lead to an A for A Level General Paper (without doing a single piece of General Paper homework in the 2 years I was in AJC). Now all my bottled up urge to write had been diluted on all my different assignments. What Individual Assignment la, learning journal la, observation journal la. This is the first time I’ve done more writing for school than for blog.

Still, I feel I owe readers and myself an update. Myself because I read my blog to remind myself of what had happened; my memory is terrible.

When I study I do alot of scribbling on foolscape paper. I seldom study, but when I study, its 100% concentration, and I block out every distraction around me. I would stay in the same position with only my writing hand moving frantically, and that could carry on without any pause for 2 or 3 hours at one stretch before I decided to take a quick break. Therefore, I’ve always been plague with the problem of hand fatigue. Because of the peculiar way in which I hold my pen, my hand get tired very quickly. Thus, I decided to such for a perfect writing tool which gives me lesser hand fatigue, and I purchased the Uniball Jetstream. Because of the angle I hold my pen, it skips like mad. The ink doesn’t come smoothly at all. I promptly gave the pen to my girlfriend.

Then I chance upon the merits of using a fountain pen online. People claim that unlike regular ballpoint/rollerball pens where you have to press the ball down on the paper in order to write, when using a fountain pen u just have to glide the nib over the surface of the paper. I promptly bought a Pilot V-Pen, a cheap disposable fountain pen that costs only $2.30 from my school’s bookshop. I was hooked. The mechanism is amazing. And it really gave me much lesser fatigue. Although Pilot V-Pen is a sad excuse of a fountain pen in the sense that the nib is rather badly made and writing with it is not as smooth as a “proper” fountain pen, from it I could appreciate the merits that a proper fountain pen could give me.

After much deliberation, I decided to spend $50+ on a Lamy Al-Star, which was voted the best pen under USD100 for its smoothness and durability. I completely love it. I scribbled almost non-stop for 4 hours while studying for econs today, using up 3/4 of the ink in my pen and nearly 20 pages of econs formulas, my hand didn’t feel tired at all. I don’t feel as if I have written anything at all. Normally, my hand would have developed sweaty palm after prolonged writing, but not with Lamy Al-Star. Ink is cheap as well, a bottle of Pelikan ink that could probably last me for months only costs around $3. The only 2 disadvantage with fountain pens for me is the fact that I am afraid I may run out of ink while using it during my studying sessions, and also because of the way I hold my pen, I keep staining my forth finger with ink.

Fountain pen is certainly for me. And I’ve poisoned 2 other schoolmates to get their own as well:)

Pen Obsession

I tend to be very obsessed with my writing tools. This obsession stopped when I entered the army, but I can feel it coming back now…

Here are some of my favorite pens I have currently..

From left to right:
1) Pilot “The Shaker” H-1010
I bought the first Shaker pencil when it was first introduced when I was in Primary School. It was priced at $4.50 at that time, and I kept that pencil all the way until my last room-clearing I did before school start in July, during which I think I have accidentally threw it away:( The H-1010 is the current top of the line Shaker pencil and uses very high quality material that is built to last, compared to those cheaper models.

2) Cross Limited Edition Mickey Mouse Ball Point Pen
I had this pen since Primary School when an aunt gave it to me. She got it from the Mickey Fiesta held in Singapore many many years back. I kept it around but didn’t really use it for the fear of dropping the pen and breaking off the dedicate Mickey Mouse ears. Replaced the ink once before. The gold colour parts had visible stains on them but I was able to remove most of the stain with a contact cleaner.

3) Parker Ball Point Pen
This pen is something you can easily buy from any Popular stores now, and is one of the cheapest steel Parker ball point pen available. This is a gift from my girlfriend. This pen has the disadvantage of reacting to your sweat and giving off a strange smell. Not for those with sweaty palm.

4) PaperMate Epic
I got this from my Primary School tuition teacher for Christmas in Primary 6. This pen is made of metal, but feel as light as any plastic pen. This pen is also special because it uses a rotating head to retract the pen rather than a clicking mechanism. It also has stripes of rubber for extra grip. This model used to sell for under $10, but was discontinued more than 5 years ago. Due to the continued demand for this pen, however, prices on Ebay has reached USD45 and above. Hunting for ink replacement is hard, I just bought the last replacement ink from my neighborhood bookshop and was told that the ink replacement is no longer in production by PaperMate. Need to use this last ink sparingly.

Whats next?
I have ordered a Pilot G2 Limited (a limited edition G2 with metal barrel) to add to my collection.

At the same time, I also realized that the Rollerball ink replacement for Mont Blanc (their pens all costs 3 digit figures and upwards) pen could fit into a regular plastic G2 with some modification. Many businessman uses Mont Blanc pens as a form of status symbol, and I am going to pwn them with my Mont Blanc ink in $2 Pilot G2.

Automatically connect to WLAN-Student with your iPhone/iPod Touch while in school

I’ve created a simple page that will generate a configuration script for SMU iPhone/iPod Touch users to have their iPhone/iPod Touch automatically connect to WLAN-Student wireless network without the need for logging in while in school.

Simply use your iPhone/iPod Touch to visit http://weikiat.net/smu/iphone and follow the 2-steps instruction.

Impact of Internet on Universities and the decline of Society

I’m taking some time off doing my IS101 Individual Project to write this.

-

A recent phenomenon that isn’t just restricted to Singapore.

More and more bright kids are choosing their career paths to go into business and management for promise of fat paychecks and perhaps sometimes due to the flock effect. But I ask, is this the way things should be?

A University is a place of learning. A place of acquiring useful prestigious knowledge that would otherwise be un-understandable by those who fail to qualify to be in one. Our society had almost always worked in the same way, with those with more knowledge and intelligence servicing those with lesser knowledge and intelligence. With this society progresses and technology improves.

Yet, with the birth of the internet, the knowledge ground is leveled. Anyone could acquire any knowledge and Universities are no longer the sole gatekeepers to knowledge. Any Tom, Dick or Harry could easily acquire knowledge from the internet and learn as much as, say, a NTU Engineering Graduate. Also, because of the advancement of communications and information technology, and also the intellect of our generation of engineers, researchers, and scientists, knowledge has an expiry date that is within an individual’s life-span. What one learns in the first year of University would probably be outdated by the time one graduates. Only internet, with its unpreceded flexibility and versatility could stand the test of time.

Thus, being an University Graduate no longer had the implication it once had in the pre-internet era. A University Graduate is now no longer in the position of power. A University Certificate would only formally confirm that an individual had these knowledge, but anyone could also have this knowledge as well.

At the same time, as more and more countries progress from being developing countries to being developed countries, the generation of parents who lived and endured hardship while earning minimal wages had seen for themselves what appears to be the comfortable life that that managers and businessmen had. They need not “get their hands dirty” and do any actual work; all they had was just to make people work for them. Thus the wisdom was passed to the next generation, the current generation, that it is better to be a boss than to get one’s hand dirty doing any actual work. Government leaders of different nation, in other to boast their country’s economy, encourage capitalism. Everyone wants wealth through a comfortable career. Everyone wants to be their own boss.

Universities, of course, saw this as their raison d’être, their reason for existence. Business and management schools start spring up to meet this new generation of intelligent businessmen/management wannabes.

But what would become of society? Managers and businesses would only exist because there are actual engineers, researchers and scientists doing proper work for the betterment of mankind. Otherwise intelligent people, who could have become the next nobel prize winner or who could have benefited humanity in one way or other if they had become scientists, engineers and researchers, all ended up choosing the career path of becoming managers and businessmen.

That also lead to another problem. With lesser and lesser bright people doing things that really matter, what is there to manage? The demand for managers and businessmen who inevitable fall.

What would that become of society? Lack of technological progress? Lesser and lesser new things get invented every year. Lesser new knowledge. Look at your toilet bowl. The basic design of a toilet bowl had undergone many changes in the past. The design is now stagnant. Who on earth would want to work on toilet bowls since it definitely would not pay as well as being a manager of some firm selling toilet bowls?

Meanwhile, Business and Management Universities would make rolling big bucks as they charge a premium for their education due to high demand, not realizing that they are also eroding away their only raison d’être.

Finally, are all these business/management wannabes cut out for it at all? Treating management and running a business like a textbook subject with examinations and endless memorization, is that supposed to be meaningful or useful? Knowing business is different from running business. If you look at all the successful business founders of our time. How many of them were actually business graduates? There was also the issue of ego. Saying that “I am reading Business Law” certainly sounds better than “I am reading Electronics Engineering”. But the main question was, who would be doing a more meaningful work that would contribute to society?

Management/Business Graduates seek to contribute to their own personal wealth, while other Graduates seek to contribute to society.

What would become of a society when everyone wants to manage and no one wants to work and change the world?

Was it all due to greed?

From young we had heard of so many stories where greed could ultimately lead to losing everything. But why is humanity as a whole pursuing this greed?

Still all hopes were not lost, as humanity always seem to have a way to fix itself. Lets wait and see.

—

Time to get back to doing IS101 Individual Project

Homework Update