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woot finally an unrecycled picture!

I decided to shift the advertisements panel back to the sidebar. after all putting it at the top doesnt mean more people will click it anyway.

I will proceed to remove the entire top section if I cant think of any new uses for it. any suggestions?

I have also updated the links section, since the "More Active" and "Less Active" links are kind of misleading, considering I dont update my template a lot nowadays since I am a "Less Active" blogger nowadays as well. embarrassing.

so now I will just put the date of my last checking of links and segregate into an upper and lower portion. if you changed your link or anything just tag me so I will update it ASAP.

also I am working on porting over to wordpress. I hate to have my posts deleted (heard that, blogger?). I should be officially unveiling it once I found a nice enough skin for it. currently its on restricted access lol.

think thats all the updates on the blog I have for now.

poly forum 2009 sub theme 4.
with the April 2009 semester out of the way, I will move on to the things that have been keeping me busy during the holidays.

the first would be the Polytechnic Forum 2009, which the school of BA sent me for from the 7th till 17th September this year.

there is also an opening ceremony on July 25th but I cant attend due to the ECD bazaar so lets skip that.

my initial impression of poly forum would be an extremely long event where we will do research on boring things (erosion of cultural identity! is this IAC or what?) with a free trip to JB on the second week.

in the end it is still a lot of boring research in the first week, but the second week was more interesting than expected.

the first week from 7th to 11th September is what they call the "Pre-Forum" week, where we collect information to collate during the JB stay.

there and four sub-themes (meaning they do research on different things, like recession, rich-poor divide, erosion of cultural identity etc). while most teams had excursions, site visits, talks and movie viewings lined up for them, poor subtheme 4 had to work within even smaller subgroups and think of where we want to visit to know more about cultural erosion.

the topic we had to start with is already so vague, but luckily we eventually worked it out and we decided to look at food and hawker fare and how young people dowan to take over or something like that.

so we interviewed older hawkers and patrons at Chinatown, Old Airport Road and some other places, while finding stalls that are not opened at some market around Shenton Way (no not Maxwell).

it is extremely IAC as we went around all these places filming people while interviewing them with questions that we came up with ourselves. and this continued from tuesday to thursday so you can imagine how tiring those few days were for us.

it is along this week that I met nice people from other polys whom I collaborated with over that week and the one after that. people like peijun, junwei, qing hui and farhan (unfortunately he moved to another working group in JB so didnt manage to stay in close contact).

friday was a collation day. for us we shared our findings at the LT18B assigned to us. its a little old and inaccessible I must say LOL. then came all the talk about us not moving in the right direction, looking at things only physically but not mentally and blahblah. then we are broken into working groups: presentation, multimedia, research and collaterals.

I am in collaterals together with quite a few of them. it turned out to be the group with the most people with the easiest but most tedious work. more discussions ensued on friday and we eventually decided to make paper cutouts of some traditional costumes, with one side for them to write what makes them singaporean and the other for them to keep as a bookmark. this ends the first week.

the second week is known as the "Residential Week" or something. we checked in at Pulai Springs Resort of JB. heard it is famous for its golf courses, but unfortunately golf courses are off limits for us.

we began work on the decorative boards on which we will hang the costume cutouts with the visitors' messages, which includes esplanade, chinatown shophouses and HDB flats. I have taken quite a few photos that I will show another time.

we also worked on cutting out all that costumes (all 500 of them) and on pasting the descriptions. that took most of monday and tuesday and a little of wednesday morning.

so by wednesday afternoon we had plenty of time to just slack around. but the slacking doesnt just start on wednesday. every night in Pulai Springs is an excitement.

monday night we met some of the people who are in our working group, namely titimah, meiqi, jezebelle and natalie. went over to their room with qing hui, junwei and peijun and watched teebee. criminal minds I think. forgot if they played any cards but probably didnt cos I think they slept early. see my memory is failing me so soon. so we just watched teebee and went back to our rooms.

at my room (is it 524? SHIT I FORGOT THE NUMBER) I talked to my dorm-mates for the next 3 days, darrell (he will be closer to us as the days go by), liqian, zhangkai, qing hui and... the alien dude (sorry!), chatted a while on MSN with melissa before sleeping.

the internet there can go suck my balls. there are 5 accounts per subtheme but not only is it slow, we keep getting disconnected because there is some limit on the number of users at once. some more internet access is sold at RM50 for 24 hours usage, which can only be shared by a few people. considering we are only back in our rooms at night it just isnt worth it. and so everyone had plenty of fun struggling to use whatever little bandwidth they could get.

second night they started playing card games proper, after watching Fated to Love You on Channel U of course. its like a daily rite of passage. they played some uno, then some dai dee, eventually they moved on to heart attack, but you have to copy the action of the person doing heart attack before putting your hands down.

at first it started with simple monkey faces but the actions got increasingly elaborate, with running around touching corners of the rooms, hitting people and spinning rounds. you can watch a video of it on my facebook, where I got hit. that happened on the 3rd day, where people like darrell, sean, dominic, zhangkai and his girlfriend had joined us.

it is one of the main games they play, and as usual I am being the audience and just watching along haha. they also played polar bear. it is a game too complicated to explain and I shall not bother, but its interesting enough.

thats how we spent most of the nights, with them playing games like these and me watching (lol). I did join towards the end la.

the 3rd day afternoon darrell and singya and I ventured out of Pulai Springs to the shopping centres nearby because its too boring. the rest of them went swimming I think.

we visited JUSCO of Taman Universiti and the shopping centre near it as well. forgot its name haha. its just pretty plain walking and looking around, and darrell stocking up hell a lot of groceries even though its the last day with my egging until he dulan at me LOL.

on the cab that we took on our way back, I noticed the meter isnt running (which is pretty common) so I simply asked him 5 ringgits? darrell heard it as 5 minutes. in the end the driver said something like errrrrrrrrrrr I try, looking very distressed. later on we realised that we sounded like we are threatening him by telling him to reach Pulai Springs in 5 minutes with 5 ringgits. oh well~

day 4 afternoon we were back in SP for the closing ceremony that will take place in the evening. its quite an uneventful time spent, just walking around and eating and a little bit of talking. didnt visit moberly in the end unfortunately.

closing ceremony was nothing special except for listening to (admittedly rather boring) presentations. the highlight is the dialogue with Minister for Community, Youth and Sports Vivian Balakrishnan (what a mouthful), where there is this EXTREMELY unhappy SP dude with all the ahtiongs cheap foreign labour influx and them taking away opportunities from us (it even appeared on the papers).

then later on an extremely PLP poly dude who rebutted what he said, saying there are still plenty of opportunities around the world and everything. drama.

since then I had an outing with the poly forum people, with a BBQ/chalet coming up soon! woot cant wait.

I intended to post about Leo Fusion actually, but its not over yet. so I think I will (hopefully) write about that when it ends this weekend.

class photo of TB22 Apr 09
in what I can only describe as an extremely-uncalled for hiatus, I am back again.

some of you may have realised it by now, but I am kinda losing steam in blogging often, one thing because a post takes a long time for me to write (this took 4 hours or so), and its not easy for me to take out an entire hour and just blog nowadays.

nevertheless, I will continue updating, albeit occassionally. not ready to shut this 6 year old thing down yet haha, though I may migrate to wordpress since blogger appears to be deleting my archives already.

the feeling of losing your old posts hurts. bloody blogger. they are like bits and pieces of my past. does wordpress delete old posts as well?

==

I promised to talk about the April 2009 Semester, and I will do so now.

the semester started out similar to the October 2008 one, where only junxiang, hup song and I managed to enter the same class again.

however, unlike at the end of Oct 08 where I made friends who I still remain in contact with now, April 09 did not return such a result.

don't get me wrong, April 09 isnt any less friendly than Oct 08. its just that April 09 sticks to their cliques a lot more, and there is a lot lesser interaction.

it is not something only I observed, even the ECD (entrepreneurship) tutor Liang Wee Kok said so, that we dont behave like a class.

could it be that the group did not attempt to include us like what simon and justin did? or is it our problem that we did not really try and interact with them as their clique is bigger?

I am treading on thin ice here, but this is a question that bugged me for the past semester. to be honest, I dont know the answer myself. my personal belief is that both sides did not make that leap, and this opportunity to know each other much better is wasted.

==

for the second part maybe we will talk about the modules.

CMA is Cost and Managerial Accounting. unlike POA, is really different from your conventional accounting, with a much greater focus on theory rather than accuracy of long calculations.

and thus there was some growing pains associated with it. it really took me a while to get used to how CMA was, with new theories that are pretty much unrelated coming up every other week while learning to apply the knowledge. this resulted in my poor showing for my CT2.

my determination to not screw CMA up made me work hard for the final exams, and thankfully the format of the finals are quite standard and I finally managed to make sense of the chapters, especially those on Cost-Volume-Profit Analysis.

FMGT too was quite a struggle, though not as much as CMA was. financial management had both theory and calculations. its the theory that was more troublesome. the theory is somehow related to one another, but it takes some effort and logic for you to see all of them in a bigger picture that will help you to appreciate it better.

the time value of money calculations though was a real problem for FMGT, since the questions varied year after year, much like your E Maths O Levels papers. the question somehow became more like a test of your understanding of english.

the FMGT video project was also fun. the video has to be 8-10 minutes long and so it was a different experience having to come up with a proper script and editing the entire length of it. also one of my group members had a nice room in his bungalow that let us filmed properly without all the surrounding noise so it was all quite smooth.

HRM was alright since it is very much like BMGT, OBSE and BLAW in the sense that it takes more memory work. however the content is somewhat deeper than the year 1 modules. the questions are also more application based (identify the job appraisal method in the case study and explain its function as opposed to explain the graphical scale rating system).

EBA (tech module) and ECD (entrepreneurship) should be discussed together, since their deadlines collide all the time. I remember vividly working like a dog for both proposals that are due on the same weekend and both requiring around 15-20 pages. in the end the quality of the reports were "split" between the two. now I know I dont work so well when multitasking lol.

the EBA online store project was quite a trouble for us as well, especially since we dont really have an idea of what to sell, and we are lazy to think of another thing to sell after having to sell things in ECD as well. some more we have to do an access database. thats why EBA isnt quite as enjoyable even with a good tutor.

the ECD bazaar was a good learning experience at doing my own business as well. it is my first go at running a stall, and we went with longkang fishing, thinking it would be easy money. turns out it wasnt quite as easy as we expected, probably since parents are watching how much they spend, and games for their kids are probably not the most important.

still, it was fun to source for fishes and its supplies, visiting places like Farmart Centre and Qian Hu multiple times, in the process learning more about rearing fishes. staying overnight at Kovan Hub was also really fun as the group spent time chatting and preparing. its probably one of the most unique memories I will ever have of my polytechnic days and I am really grateful for that. I am not sure if the rest of the group felt what I felt but I am really thankful for them for being with me throughout the process.

==

as for the tutors, I have to say they are all really nice for April 2009. probably except the CMA tutor whom I never really managed to chat with.

Mdm Jacqueline Fong struck me as being extremely nice of the entire lot. she goes through lecture slides and tutorials pretty immaculately, checking to ensure we did our work and shared quite a bit of her work experiences. in fact she lectures quite a few modules for year 3 HR as well, all of these very telling of her experience in the field of HR. she was also the one who kinda made me realise I have quite some interest in HR which I may consider pursuring.

Miss Lim Meng Keng is one of the lecturers for Financial Management and also my tutor. she probably has some experience, but I feel that she isnt as knowledgeable with the topics as what Jacqueline Fong had with HR. not to say that she is unqualified la, just that the depth and passion in the field seems different. but she is incredibly friendly as well, and one who likes to crack jokes. not the most funny but in a way she tries to connect with the students and did not fail that badly.

Mr Jonanthan Chan is the module leader, lecturer and tutor for EBA, a computing module. the things we learn in it are definitely not the most fun, especially the e-business thingy that involves setting up eBay stores and everything. however, he is a cool guy. he is probably the one I had the most non-academic related chats with, similarly because he knows quite a bit about news both technologically and non-technogically related and its interesting to exchange ideas with him.

Mr Yam Weng Wah is the module leader, lecturer and tutor (again) for CMA, an accounting module. he is kinda monotonous and thus its a little difficult to understand what exactly he is talking about. to be honest my interaction with him wasnt exactly great for that reason, thus I dont really have much to say about him. I feel bad but well, I have to say at least he made the effort to go through all tutorials and classwork properly, something that other CMA tutors may not have necessarily done.

finally, Mr Liang Wee Kok is the module leader, lecturer and tutor for ECD. he for one is one of the most easygoing tutors I have ever known. he gives plenty of hints for the final test, shares a lot of his information he garnered from his time as an entrepreneur and is generally quite relaxed about rules, such as formal wear during presentations. his lessons are relaxing to attend too.

to conclude, I would say that I am really lucky for April 09 since I met all the tutors who are either lecturers and/or module leaders, which meant they had some years of experience in both the field and in teaching behind them. this was probably why the entire learning experience was generally more pleasant for Apr 09 semester, helping me to achieve the results I had set out for.

==

and thats the April 2009 Semester in review.