艺心艺意

艺心艺意

A great programme on channel u showcasing local artists in Singapore with a different theme each week.

Got a glimpse of the tv highlights for the new episode in the coming week, featuring work of arts of local architects and on art work on local buildings.

Got me thinking the life and path I would be walking now if I had chosen to take up a degree in architecture rather than an engineering degree many years back.

I seriously pondered why I had thought of such stupid things.

Back to the days while I was in JC, I had always wanted to be an architect. JC is the time when people start to ask what course you wanted to do in the university. I just got the thought of doing architecture. Since I used to like to draw and be creative back then, from the influence of a tv programme I saw when I was young. That particular tv show, taught kids to draw, to shade, drawing aliens, futuristic buildings, guess I got hooked and was influenced in some ways. I remembered I kept a sketch book for the drawings I learnt from the tv. I even got addicted to a point to have dinner infront of the tv while watching the show.

The idea of doing a degree in architecture soon faded as I heard of the number of years to complete the course and to be a full-fledged architect in Singapore.

6 years.

I counted the number of years in National Service (NS), with the number of years in the course, by the time I graduated, I would be damn old le. Some how I felt it was too late a time to step out into the world and start building a career. At the same point in time, some of senior friends advised on the future of the world, the world with technology, the world where one who could control or have master over technology would thrive and be successful in life. Thus the course of engineering paved new light to the dim situation I was in.

Bachelor in Engineering, a shorten version, B.ENG, as to Ah BENG?

4 years to honours and whats more with lots of friends suffering doing the same course too. Why not?

So I took up engineering.


If someone has just told me to go on and pursue my dreams back then.

Gave a shove at the back, a gesture of encouragement and support.

Maybe I would be pursuing a degree in architecture now.


I would be NUS than in NTU.

Clementi than Boon Lay.

Not in archery, maybe in some mountain climbing club? Climb some mountains maybe rather than shoot some birds?

In a class with more chic girls than in a class of full of geeky guys?

Drawing buildings than drawing circuit boards.

Calculating dimensions of furniture than calculating bandwidth gain.

Comparing the best color for a particular wall than analyzing waveform for a particular signal.

Life would totally be different.


Fate.

That is what I like to call it.

I always like to say that life is already pre-designed and pre-planned. All paths are already laid and we are just following this pre-planned path. There is no wrong choice or wrong decision, we are just falling into the path that was pre-planned for us. The only thing that we can choose is how fulfilling, how fruitful and how exciting we want this journey in life that we are following to be. Make the best out of the decision made.


Enough of day dreaming.

Tutorials starting next week. Sianz.

Catch 艺心艺意, every Thurday 930pm on channel u.

one

I initially wanted to write this a few days ago…

The beckoning of the OC (orientation camp) the day I came back to Singapore triggered the images from memory lane. The nicks on msn, the call from V, the anticipation of the OC around, told me how old I was getting on.

It has been one year since I started blogging.

The one that introduced me to blogging was Fiona, a lab mate I got to know back then.

I felt no harm in giving it a try.

I named it “come some up a music”… which happens to be the phrase Jacky Wu likes to say in his variety shows when he wants some music to be played in the background. At least that is what I thought he was saying lar.

OK, later then did I know he was actually saying “come some of a music”. But what the hack. At least, my blog name sounds unique wor.


And so I posted my first entry.

Instantly I felt the fun and the things I could do with this.

Officially, the first post was an entry about the orientation I went to help out one year back. After a year, I still felt it was a classic entry, one good story to go down memory lane.

I found that blogging was a great tool for me.

I wanted to get all my thoughts at the current period of time down onto something so that many years later I could still read it and reflect on my way of thinking back then. Be it funny, childish or emotional, at least it gave an opportunity to see the route and path of change and growth. To see the difference in thought and feeling on certain situations or issues in the different stages of life. Maybe that could make one be a better person and also provide an avenue to be more sensitive to issues that matter to the heart and to the mind.

I decided to keep my blog simple...

An effort to prevent myself from blogging for attention, sinking to the "dark side" of blogging.

What I required was just an avenue to write down interesting thoughts.

Yet at one point in time, I wanted to let more people to know of my blog. I wanted to msn or icq my blog address to all those on my contact list.

But somehow I did not.

Maybe I felt that even though I told them the address they would not bother to read. I felt that the stuff that I have intended to blog on would be too personal to let my friends to know of. Maybe because some of these entries would be bad mouthing them, maybe having to let more friends to know, my entries would be deviated to them, deviated from my intentions of blogging.

But after months of blogging, I just did not care about people viewing my blog. The sole intention was to keep as close to my initial intentions as possible.

My audience was me.

Me, myself, only.

So if you are the one who happens to have the priviledge to be invited to view my blog, be proud ok.

Count yourself as the lucky ones, that I would like to share some stuff with you.

After one year of knowing more of blogging, I got to “peep into the privacy of more bloggers”. Ok, actually it is not an intrusion of privacy lah, if you want to blog, then that means it is not something that you do not want others to know. Anything on the internet, everyone can access it some way or rather.

I felt the famous bloggers had their own share of audience with their good entries. But I still prefer to read bloggers of a much lower profile, someone with a little story of their own that they want to blog it out, it could very well be a garang guni man blogging the story of the interesting incidents that happen each day at work. I would gladly be the unheard, unsound audience, enjoying the very story that would trigger some thoughts in the mind or at heart.

So far, I have about 90 blogs that I have their feeds on my bloglines account.

However reading blogs owned by friends can never be compared to reading blogs of strangers. After one year of blogging, and I found the initial kakis that blogged together seems to have stopped. Guys like Edmund and Shaolong. No matter the reason to stop, hopefully you guys are still reading this blog wor.

One year of blogging, though not having many entries, I felt I became more sensitive to issues and things happening around me. Each entry has a story to tell, a reason meaningful to myself, and hopefully meaningful to someone who happens to chance upon it.


PS: Want to thank all readers who have been constantly reading this blog. Especially all those who commented on the entries before. It does make my day when i know from your comments that my article has made some sense to you people besides myself and it has brought some meaning and interest in some moment in time for you.

Fish in a Fish Tank

I left my "fish tank" hall, Hall 5 after finding my hall kakis missing in action after my attachment. Either they had graduated, left hall, on attachment or upgraded to owning a car and driving to campus.

Just to say, times spent in hall with you people were one of the best times.

I figured I needed a change in environment.

Living in a "fish tank" for many years made me smell of dead fishes. Kidding lah. So i took a lucky bet and landed myself in Hall 6. Hmmm, actually I did hear 风声 on which level to choose to have a higher chance of getting a room of my choice.




"Life in NTU halls is either choosing between having a jog or having sex late in the night."

I read the above from someone’s blog entry a long time back. The author of the blog was rather pissed after having uncountable personnal encounters of his roomie's doing that "thing" in their hostel room. For all these years staying in hall, the most I heard were stories shared during the “la teh” sessions, so far no personal experience or encounters as yet.

Maybe I was in the wrong hall all these years.

That is what I felt when the hall office people urged to me to take one of the following when I checked in a few days back.



It was a semester calender with words of important advice.

Wah… was it only Hall 6 that needed this?

Or… maybe because it was the way I looked when I went to draw my keys.

Final year how to hanky panky? Too old, too fat, receding hairline, too busy, don’t you think so?

Nah, I saw other freshies getting the same stuff as well. At least that was reassuring.


Later while clearing and cleaning up the room.

I stumbled upon porn in my room.



The disc instantly landed right at my feet when I decided to pull out one of the drawer compartment to have it wiped clean. The porn dvd was sort of hidden underneath the drawer compartment. I guess the disc was left by the previous occupant of the room whom has forgotten to “clear stock” before returning his keys to the hall office. The title reads: "亚洲成人电影系列, 丽人篇". So if you are the previous occupant who happens to be reading this blog, and if you want your “stuff” back, you can always email me hor.

Anyway, I could not read the dvd. The dvd player tried to read the disc and prompted me with the following message on the tv screen:

The disc is dirty.

I am sure that my dvd player has no inbuilt “family viewing only” feature. My best bet was that there were too many scratches at the back of the disc that gave the result.


Final year in NTU. Study hard, work hard, play even harder!

Organize your days around your goals

Read from SPUG Forums

BRAZEN CAREERIST

Organize your days around your goals
By Penelope Trunk

Periodically, a college student sends an email to me asking if he or she can interview me for a term paper. I always say yes, and I always learn something about my work by answering student questions about my career.

Invariably, within the list of questions, there’s a stumper. This week, the stumper was, “How do you spend a typical day as a journalist?”

I started to answer the question. But every time I started to write an answer, what I wrote sounded terrible. The truth is that I never set out to be a journalist, so I have never been particularly organized about my typical day.

I was a marketing executive who happened to have landed a column. The pay for the column was paltry compared to my corporate salary, and consequently, I devoted a paltry amount of time to the column –writing it during a sales meeting, on my way to an office picnic, or at my in-laws’ home in between shopping and dinner.

Part of the reason for my cavalier attitude toward making time for the column is that initially I did not understand that having a nationally distributed column is a big deal; I was in a business where a big deal equaled a big paycheck. But after I left corporate life for a writer’s life, I started to understand how lucky I was. So you'd think, after three years of writing full-time I’d have developed good work habits as a writer, but I haven't.

This is surprising to me because in my corporate life I had very good work habits. As I was climbing the corporate ladder, it became clear that you can only move up as fast as you can adjust your work habits to the next rung. For example, the move into management means you have to learn to finish your own work in a way that leaves room for you to help other people with their work. You have to restructure your workday to make other people a priority.

There were times when I distinctly remember changing my workday in order to accommodate a new position. For example, my boss told me that if I could off load all of my responsibilities as a marketing and software production manager, then I could take seed money from the company and start my own company. I realized that the faster I could reorganize my workload and
delegate, the faster I could move on with my career. So I did that. Within weeks, and astounded even my boss with my speed.

Achieving long-term goals and tactical plans all depends on work habits. You need to devote time to getting short-term projects done, to managing long-term projects, and to thinking both strategically and creatively.

Each time I've wanted to make headway in my career the fastest path has been by changing how I spend my days; if nothing else, how you organize your days is one of the few things most people can really control.

Which brings me back to explaining to the college student about my work habits. It was untenable to have to confess to her how I was working. I was such a bad role model because in terms of organizing my day, I still treated my writing career like it’s a sideshow.

I could accomplish so much more if I would get more organized. So I worked backwards. I said to myself, what kind of answer would I expect from a successful career columnist as to how she manages her days to make her career bloom?

I think it would look like time slots:
Writing email
Working on projects with deadlines
Thinking about long-term projects
Publicity
Networking

Once I started having days like this, there was immediate change – I accomplished more than usual and the work was higher quality because my days were organized around particular long and short-term goals.

I ended up confessing to the student that I started with sloppy work habits. But I told her that I was reforming myself. I told her about my carefully scheduled days and strategically organized weeks. Then I sat down to write this column, which I now have a special time each week to write. And I was just a little bit more calm than usual because having a detailed work plan in hand makes me feel like I really am going to meet the goals I have for myself.

~

Felt the paragraph in bold in the above article was so much true. The method of working backwards is really a good way to know the expectations when striving for goals. At least it allows us to know how and what we could do in order to achieve our goals. Once the expectations are known, just work accordingly to these expectations and goals would be achieved eventually.

Beginning of the End

When FOC (freshmen orientation camp) marks the start of the undergraduate years, Convocation deems its end. However this end, in another way also signifies the start of the new chapter in life as graduate, new paths await, and with dreams to fulfill. I always believe that these years of undergraduate studies are used to train the mind, to mould a person. I feel that it is not really how much you have learnt but how we are given a chance to develop our own way of learning, thinking and way of handling, solving situations. This is a time to explore the possibilities, to make mistakes, in order to gain experience and be used to aid us in our future chapters of life.

No its not my turn yet, one more year to go.

This week was scheduled for the Convocation of NTU Class of 2005. Hopefully in the next year, at the same time and place, I will be wearing that mortar board, donning that convo gown, holding the scroll, looking like an acclaimed professor. At least that is what my friend ensured I will look when I commented on his convo photos.

Yunnan Garden was flooded with MIB (Men In Blue convo gowns) as I left NTU on 179. So offen that I wondered why graduates like to wear their convo gowns and pose under the hot sun at Yunnan Garden.

Ok, maybe Yunnan Garden is more scenic than most places in campus. But, I also saw MIB posing with the Chinese Temple Heritage Centre in the background, in my opinion a less scenic and a more eerie part of the garden late in the night.

Maybe in another year when I am able to don that blue convo gown, I will finally realize the hype of taking photos in Yunnan Gardens under the blazing sun.

At least current graduates are able to have their convocation in campus, unlike my elder brother who was convo-ed at Kallang Theatre, if I did not remember wrongly. A convocation held at Nanyang Audit is definitely able to capture better memories of the many years spent in NTU.

Suggested places to capture memories rather than Yunnan Garden:

1. MLT, the aircon so nice, the seat so nice, the screen so nice…

2. Various LTs and Tutorial rooms. Take evidence of the spots where quiz answers were copied and then laugh: Ha! That’s how and where I got my honours!

3. Lee Wee Nam Library of course, so many countless hours at the computer terminals playing yahoo games and fighting for seats during exam periods. Have we ever paused and look at the statue before leaving the library?

4. iHUB, err maybe not, I do not really like the ah nei who take cares of that place.

5. Labs. The gazillion Pentium 4s, LCDs, equipment costing gazillion dollars were partly paid by our tuition fees. If you can’t take them, at least pose with them.

6. Never forget Canteen 3 Idol. Xie lerrrrr!

7. The fave people watch corners in Canteen A & B.

8. Hall sweet Hall. Pantry areas where late night suppers were held, washing machine area where sweet, cute, seldom out of room chio hostel babe is seen and initial conversations were made.

9. Range. Where sweat was left, where skins were burnt, where goals were strived, where comradeship were forged, where spirits were challenged.


Best wishes to all graduating friends! Your future is solely yours to choose.

Hong Kong

Back!

Managed to fulfil the wish of going Hong Kong for a 6 days (4th to 9th July) trip which was fortunately not disrupted by the call from the man in green.

It was a first to venture over to Hong Kong. I always wanted to see the street scenes as seen on the numerous Hong Kong TVB dramas on tv and in the movies. To see the high rise buildings, to see the streets packed with people, to see "leng noi" (pretty girl in Cantonese), basically to experience living in some place totally different, some where out of the typical, i-know-whats-gonna-happen-next, with ugly people of Sillypore.



Cries of worries of rainy weather prior to the trip were immediately lifted at the sight of clear blue skies as we soar thousand of feet above South China Sea on our flight to HK. It was a first attempt at flying on a budget airline as most of the flights I have flown on were SQ, all thanks to the almighty guys in green. Sitting at the rear of the miniature Airbus, allowed me to see how violently the wings on the plane shook at the moment of take off. That is one scene I can relate to how life can be so vulnerable at times.

Vulnerabilities of humanity coincided with my vacation for a second time. In December last year, tsunami struck one day prior to my intended trip to KL and Penang. This time the subway bombing in London occurred amidst the trip to HK. I just hope these were just mere coincidences to my vacations, or else I will not go on anymore overseas trip in order to have World Peace!

It was a well spent six days, touring Kowloon to Hong Kong Island. Taking the expensive and long trip to Macau. We even ventured to Shenzhen, the “Johor Bahru” for residents of Hongkong. The food in Shenzhen was extremely cheap, not forgetting the high piracy level which allowed us to “import” many dvds back home.



买东西，吃东西，买东西，吃东西…



Yup, shopping is really zu zu in HK. The latest trends and good customer services could be found in most shops all over the country. The weekday night crowd in Mong Kok was a least a few times the size of weekend Orchard Road. It was an easy task to find leng zai and leng noi within the crowds.



Most of my expenses went to food and travel. The cost of food was almost twice that of our local meals. The portions were however much more and we were definitely willing to splurge more on it.

We took all the possible public transport available in HK. I personally find that the MTR was the best choice to get around anywhere. It was even possible to cross the sea from Kowloon to HK island. The frequency of the MTR was fast, the directions were clear, the lights of the map in the train cabin itself made commuters know which stations to change lines, what stations were on this line. After a few trips, we were all pro in getting around HK via MTR.





Bold and adventurous attempts of taking the public bus, the electric tram, the 16 seat bus, the taxi and the ferry should not be forgotten. These were quick and great opportunities to see the sights of HK. Cruising on the less populated streets made me feel closer to the life of the HK people. Especially on occasions where we got lost from taking the wrong bus to the wrong place.



Although it took me about a day of sleeping to get back the life of Singapore, images of HK momentarily still lingers at times.

On the local MRT at home, I felt the unusual emptiness and quietness in the cabin. The HK MTR cabins were really packed most of the time, and the level of chattiness of communters was really high. HK people are really talkative, at least that is what I felt. Sometimes their level of talking sounds really like someone nagging non-stop at you, especially when my understanding of Cantonese is only at the kinder-garden level.



I naturally stood on the right aisle of the escalator after I alighted the MRT today. It was such a distinctive phenomena to witness in HK, where most of the commuters taking the MTR were disciplined enough to stand at the right hand side of the escalator while the left hand aisle were left to commuters who were on the rush to walk up or down the escalator. This was especially true at the Central Station (similar to the local City Hall or Raffles Place Station). This made us Sillyporeans in HK look like a twerp on the escalator hogging the left lane. This made me recall the posters on our local MRT where commuters are encouraged to use the left aisle and leave the right aisle for those on the rush on the escalator many years back. After this many years, that poster seems to be extinct and still Sillyporeans fail to have this thoughtful habit. I just feel the urge to laugh at the silly ways of Sillyporeans. Silly you silly me.



I am missing leng nois already.

My vacation buddies and I came up with the 3 big traits of HK leng nois:

1. Big feet.
2. Thick eyebrows.
3. Xiu bo bo (小波波, small boobs in Cantonese?)



Trait number 3 was the most common among HK girls. Even the local guys that we met told us that fact, comparing HK girls and Singapore girls. This was one way for us to distinguish between the local girls in Hong Kong with the other tourists and the China girls in Shenzhen without talking with them. To a certain extent it was accurate wor.

After the six days trip, I returned with:

567 photos on my digital camera, not counting those from 2 other cams of my traveling buddies.

Smelly and dirty clothes from walking up and down HK.

1 x huge hole in the pocket.

One happy smile on the face.

And many wonderful memories in the head.