dEsKOh91 VX

since I am so slack I decided to update everything at one go. have a great read =P

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Queueing for CWS Star Buys, The Prelouge: Daytime
17th March 2005, Day before 1st day of CWS
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daytime is pretty uneventful. most interesting stuff happens only at nighttime. anyways, I reached the place with two seniors at about 7am in the morning. thanks to another senior, Ivan, we managed to secure seats 3 to 7 even though he forgot to reserve one more seat for Bahari. Ivan reserved the seat the previous day on 17th (which is 2 days before the thing begins) at 7pm. hurriedly reserved one more seat at 37 for Bahari first and I started exploring the place. read the history of creative a few times before I got bored of it and explored the first story here and there.

did not leave for the other levels until I got led to the Staff Canteen at the 7th storey. 8 of us which includes even more seniors and the guy who took the first two seats. nice scenery up there as it is the roof of the Headquarters and the canteen is designed with translucent glass and the aircon up there is extremely cooling. stepping out onto the roof are actually some staircase that can link you to the office buildings and not to forget the scenery. Creative Resource the building is situated at a location where there is not much blockage and it is sunny and cooling out at the roof.

bought some claypot rice for lunch. the bowl kept moving around so much that it took me half an hour to finish it. I skipped breakfast since I am enjoying the morning wind and cant be bothered wasting time for breakfast.

the rest of the daytime is spent on idle chats, walking around and whats not...on to night time...

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Queueing for CWS Star Buys, The Prelouge: Nighttime
17th March 2005, Night before 1st day of CWS
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night is the time when we started looking for "clients" who wanted to buy star buys but came too late. we help them buy at a charge. as it goes later into the night, more people arrived though by about 10pm not as much people started arriving. anyway I found mine at around 8pm. many of us made plans on how much to make within the next days though it is unfortunately disrupted. more on that later.

only at about midnight did the few of us go for "dinner". my senior called kang sheng (ks) brought me and his neighbour zhi chong (zc), also a commonwealthian, went to the area near Jurong East Central to have dinner. it is the first time I took the path right under the MRT track which brings us there much faster than walking on the main road. at night the place is pretty creepy for there is no light and the terrain isnt flat, not to forget small drains here and there. the MRT track in that area as you know is located in some sort of grass field and away from light sources except the front. this journey is quite fun and I loved it quite a lot personally. finally reached the 24h food court near the interchange and bought a drink there. dont feel like buying the only noodle stall open at that time even though I am hungry. really dont know why myself.

after going the same way back to the Headquarters again. ks after being there a few times of course knew a few nice spots in the building together with the other seniors. the three of us went to fifth storey only to find the other four there already sleeping. the fifth storey is a much better place to sleep than the queue area for there is aircon and the cool floor. unfortunately we somehow got spotted by the security guard on duty and made us go back down. on our way down we saw the black colour balls where a security camera is installed and the security person told us it is a security camera. I liked zc answer of "Har that is a security camera ah? I thought is disco ball!".

back down to first storey is about 1am++ and I decided to go to the "auditorium" which is quite near the queue area to sleep instead. it is more cooling there and all but I am feeding the mosquitos and I finally went back to the queue area and I saw the auntie at the first two seats (whom we got along pretty well with) has laid out three or four mats and zc decided to sleep there. we had a chat with the auntie for a while before going to sleep at about 2.30am.

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Queueing for CWS Star Buys, The 1st Day: Daytime
18th March 2005, The 1st day of CWS
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woke up at about 5.30am on that day after only about 3 hours of sleep and see ks sitting at the chair in front of me where I slept. seemed to me that he did not sleep at all. both of us went to clean ourselves up a bit and we joined Ruiming, yet another CCA senior and the son of the auntie in some card games. the personnel has gotten all signs up by now, probably hung on the previous night.

as we got later into the day. some people actually arrived only at about 7am++ hoping to get to buy the starbuys. with people like us around, fat hope. too bad we took all "clients" already...

at 10+am it is time to redeem tickets. we originally hoped to leave our bags at the seats, go up and buy the starbuys and pass it to the client and go back and queue. unfortunately the event official dont allow us to or I would have struck it rich. damn those idiots.

went home after this since I cant be bothered with buying a seat just to earn another 90 for the next day. not too worth it.

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Visit to cousin's house
19th March 2005
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went there to help them do a format and routinely install the standard drivers and applications back in. completed within 1+ hours since it is quite an easy job for me. other programs they wanna include they can install themselves.

basically spent most of the time resting there so nothing much to comment on.

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Non Starbuys CWS Visit
20th March 2005
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as my uncle wanted to get an MP3 player. I went to the CWS yet again and I chose a Rhomba NX for him finally for his focus is on FM and MP3. FM is the clearest with the NX and the MP3 functions of creative players are somewhat the same so it does not really matter.

quite tired now. may fill up with more stuff tomorrow.

I will be joining the Creative Star Buys queue for the quarter monthly creativex festival and it will last all the way till 18th Mar 11am. so unless I can sell my seat at 100> on thursday night, you probably wont see me all the way till 2 or 3pm on 18th.

hope to see ya on the 18th then!

there is another post that is almost 2000 words which is newly typed and updated! go and read that too!

since many seemed to be getting new blogs recently, might as well ask you all go take a look at it.

in case you minsunderstood, new means both the URL and the blog skin had been changed, which requires some notice as some of you may not notice the change if the URL remains static there. many many people have changed their blogskins. might wanna go take a look.

Kang Sheng, Farhan (he shamelessly asked me to publicise it) Kuan Hui have all gotten new blogs and are all blogger based. I have no idea what the URLs are except that kh have some extemely long one.

not to forget, there is a new kid in the blog, class chairman phyo got a blog too! apparently with the help of metinee whom he err... *the following content is censored for your viewing pleasure =P* it is no wonder he asked for her help right? heh heh.

the message is. go and read them! especially farhan's one since he likes to post events updates, which is pretty interesting. (he paid me 50 dollars to do some publicity) not to forget he designed his own background and all. a very nice look and feel I have to say (honestly). just go take a look to find out.

hey I overcame my laziness and I feel like writing a 1000+ words entry! see if I can reach that target with this one...

I decided to streamline the way I am going to do my major events updates (as in those which update four to five activities at a time) the previous way of presentation tends to make me put everything within one paragraph and keep digressing and the final product will just look like a whole load of bs written within a paragraph, like the last this new style (that is shamelessly copied from "Legal Grounds") have more paragraphing and the different events are sorted out into different sections (meaning I would digress in paragraphs instead, significantly from the Legal Grounds) and makes it easier to read.

as you can see most of my activities are cybernauts oriented, since it is the end of term 1 and it is the time to make refinements to the system, in fact this time it is a major overhaul too, just like the major overhaul from term 4 2004 to term 1 2005, with the new training systems proposed. more on that below... I would also be retaining my style of no capital letters across whole paragraph except first letter. I find it easier to type this way. it isnt much of a distraction either...

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Cybernauts Management Committee Meeting 2A
8th March 2005, Tuesday
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conducted while the members are having their routine trainings, it is somewhere at the staircase near computer laboratory 3. there is basically nothing done in this meeting except the idea of a Day Camp for March holidays and some footwork for it.

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Cybernauts Management Committee Meeting 2B
12th March 2005, Saturday
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this is conducted outside school in the noon at some particular corner at the 4th storey of the Jurong Regional Library. it is basically an extension to what we are doing on Meeting 2A and it is also this time when the scavenger hunt that took 7 hours of planning began. the planning of it did not end till late night online. anyway turns out that there are a few distractions in the library that kept the meeting from going smoothly and in the end wasting about an hour in total. the camp is already planned properly though. this meeting leads us to....

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Cybernauts Management Committee Meeting 2C
Night of 12th March 2005, Saturday till Night of 13th March 2005, Sunday ==========================================
at this meeting, there is only the paperwork to do for the day camp which is done seperately by different members in the management committee. this meeting is conducted online through multi-user chat in MSN Messenger, explaining its interesting times and days. there is a break in between somewhere but because I am not at home, I am only at the meeting during the late saturday night and late sunday night.

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Cybernauts March Day Camp 2005
14th March 2005, Monday
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this is your usual orientation-lookalike camp. icebreakers, scavenger hunts blahblah...only thing is people are split into groups to work on a flash presentation. as this camp is planned in quite a rush and the management committee did not really had something similar to planning a camp before, the timing went all screwed up. the icebreakers took up an hour instead of the planned half an hour and each of the introduction to the next section took 10 minutes extra. the 7 hours of brainpower scavenger hunt took only half an hour to complete.

people are running like The Amazing Race (1 to 7 also can) to get the clues. the next day camp will invovle 16 more challenging questions, guranteed to make the game more fun =D at the end of the day.

our senior chairman, mr ooi kang sheng, wrapped up the camp with a shortened version of the essential skills in the Adam Khoo's I am gifted, so are you day camp. overrunning the already 10 minutes overrun programme by another 50 minutes. it is supposed to end by 3.15 but turned out to be 4.15. anyway the speech is interesting and isnt a waste of time anyway.

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Cybernauts Management Committee Meeting 3
14th March 2005, Monday
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this happened during the presentation production session at the exact same place of Meeting 2A. this meeting covers the administrative matters starting next term onwards, where the sec 4s would no longer participate in the activities of the CCA. not to forget, there is an overhaul on the training system as the current one used in term 1 proved to be not too successful and is still somewhat like last year. hopefully this refined system will be able to work well.

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enough of cybernauts stuff, now lets have some updates on personal life... ===========================================
even though it is the holidays, there is a WHOLE LOAD OF HOLIDAY HOMEWORK! this isnt a holiday at all. maybe it is because the teachers have a different opinion on what is a school holiday. I have...

- 3 maths algebra problem sums worksheets
- 1 home economics project
- 1 geography project
- 1 geography mindmap
- 30+ pages of geography workbook
- 1 comprehension
- 2 book reviews
- an upcoming chinese class test on monday

and I havent even started on either of them -.-"

guess I am dead. other than homework, I got quite a few places to visit too...

- my aunt workplace to fix her Chinese Star stuff
- cousin house to fix the computer (again)
- creative warehouse sale (or the creativex fest)

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Visit to aunt's workplace
16th March 2005, Wednesday
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I have been trying to get a working piece of Windows ME disc. if you have any, please be a kind soul and copy one for me as I need it to install my mother's DOS games (dont know why she likes those games so much but well...). all those ahem ones I bought are not working so far. I didnt know my luck is that lousy...

in case you are thinking, I wont be using the Windows ME, I would still be using Windows XP, but then I will dual boot it and you get to choose which do you wish to boot to.

why the sudden decision for something like this? I got a Seagate 160GB to store my ever expanding collection of variety shows and anime and finding 160GB a bit overkill to leave it all to videos and songs, I thought I might as well put the extra space to good use, and I can finally password protect Windows XP. but all these cant be carried out till I finally get a working WinME disc...which leads me to the main purpose of the visit. other than to fix the Chinese Star thing, I would also get the Win98 SE disc from them and see if I am able to upgrade to ME after installing Win98 SE. every visit there will usually turn up to be from like 2pm to 8pm. not to forget there is free food and computer use and airconditioning, I do quite like it there. I have been dragging this on since somewhere in January it is better that I get it done fast. another reason for visitng is to collect their unused battery chargers and the batteries. lets see whether it is those 2 hour chargers or something =D

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The Creative quarter-yearly warehouse sales: A Creativex Fest: Colour Fantasia
17th March 2005 to 19th March 2005, Friday to Sunday
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I am seriously considering the idea of queuing up for starbuys and selling away the seat at about 100 dollars (it is workable, my senior tried it before). a friend of mine and some seniors will also be in the queue and we can take care of each other. after 2 nights I will be 200 dollars richer...but well if I am queueing it would mean going on the previous day 7am to join the queue (this is how early the queue gets).

since there is about 5 to 6 people, we can all take care of each other like when the creative personnel come and conduct a check one of your friends can say that you are eating or you went to the toilet or something like that. in case you do not know, creative star buys are actually items priced at an extreme low price and you have to queue up overnight for it.

see http://creativex.creative.com/promos/whs_mar05/starbuys.asp for some indication of how low the prices are. if you are interested in getting them and dont feel like queuing overnight. you can pay me about 100-200 more than the star buys price and I will queue and get it for you. this idea seemed most workable with megaworks 5.1 and zen PMC on 3rd day.

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Visit to cousin house to fix computer
18th March 2005, Saturday
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since one of my three cousins using the poor overworked (though not as overworked as mine) Thunderbird 1.4 contacted it with some new found virus (actually it is a new variant of an old virus) which is the MSN messenger that what send this file that file one. she blur blur go accept then in the end tio liao. and I have to make a visit down to their house to make it work again.

anyway it is a good idea since I cant right click on my account's songs and videos after I deleted the stupid Home 2004 music video. killing two birds with one stone =D

fixing their computers if there is no interruption inclusive of format and install and all it is about 3 hours (though my own can take up to 7 hours with so many things to install and configure...) and can be considered quite an easy job

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according to microsoft word's word count this turns out to be a total of 1683 words, inclusive of below. so I have successfully completed this extremely long entry.

this article is not checked for grammatical, spelling and typing errors because it is so tiring to even type this long entry out. I believe you would be able to comprehend its contents even if there is any error in it.

till the next update.

the school said they will be conducting a spotcheck last friday and checks include socks, hair, fingernails, shoes, uniform and even bags as they said only mobile phones are allowed but not any other form of electronics (what an irony) and I did not bring my MP3 player for one whole week.

having been listening to FM on journies to and from school ever since the start of year, it does make the journies more boring without it even though it has been only one week. this shows that having music around you wherever you go does get addictive. while it is not as bad as being a drug addict, you would somewhat find time passes slower without that source of sound around you. with the current drop in prices of MP3 players, especially Creative (bleh) ones where a 128MB with FM goes for 129 ($20 drop in price), 149 for 256MB with FM ($40 drop) and 219 and 309 for 512MB with FM and 1GB with FM models ($60 drop in price!)

as you can see, Creative products depreciate very quickly. the Zen Micro 5GB that used to be 520 is now 438, with the soon to be release of the 4GB and 6GB versions and in response to the iPod Mini price cut. you dont see an iPod 4G (4th Generation) dropping its price that much do you (it has been in the 550 regions ever since release)? not to forget the warehouse sale that comes quarterly, you can practically get their products at 100-200 dollars cheaper in a quarter to half a year, something very rare in the electronics industry.

I seemed to have drifted off from my topic, it has now become a Creative rants post but who cares. I added more content to the blog didnt I =P

heard from the principal that the 2004 batch of seniors did quite well. as I am at the back then. I am not too sure about the analysis though I am pretty sure it is quite a large improvement. according to an article I found in Straits Times...

according to vice-principal Yip Chang Wai Fong. Of the 228 Express stream students at the school, 91 per cent qualified for junior college with aggregate scores of 20 and below, compared with 81 per cent last year. Among Normal stream students, 90 per cent qualified for junior college or polytechnic studies, compared with 44 per cent last year.

and there is also some major improvements in a few subjects. but I am sitting so far to the back that I cant hear it quite well. anyway congrats to your wonderful results and thank you for holding CSS's autonomous position.

I am outta the Councillor shit! I am so happy about it! that Koh Ren Kiat screwed up and read the wrong name on the day where they annouced the people who passed the 1st interview, messing up my name with another person's. this thing just wasted two extra weeks of my youth since I am not even shortlisted in the first round. now I would look forward to their splendid self introduction next monday =)

dont mention the maths common test 2 thanks.

yesterday three guys came back from some "birthday party" and laugh whenever the word "Surprise!", "Birthday Party" and "Birthday Present" is mentioned. dont know what went into them but it is pretty comical to see them laugh so hard while doing push ups that they had a hard time doing it.