no pay leave

Fret not, I'm not like burning down this blog or something. Just that a monster (or bitch) known as FYP is here. With only 3 weeks to go, it seems like time to wrap up whatever little rubbish I have there.

Unless I have something dying to say here, I think I'll just concentrate on my final year project for the time being.

chillycraps, signing out.

moto w233 renew

The next time you throw a plastic water bottle into the recycle bin, it could very well come back by your ear as part of your mobile phone.

I'm talking about the MOTO W233 renew, the first "carbon-neutral phone with plastics that contain recycled water bottles". I read that even its brochure is made from vegetable-based ink and 100% recycled paper. They even include a postage-paid envelope inside the box for you to mail back your old phone for recycling.

By emphasizing its "greenness", I guess it can be a selling point for this phone. But looking at the features it seems like it is not competing in the same category as other brands, since the W233 lacks wifi connectivity, camera and no touch screen. If they can extend beyond basic telephony, that would be a plus.

Now, I'm writing this thing because it happens to be related to my research and all, that is plastics and recycling (urgh) and a bit of product development. Motorola didn't pay me a dime for this.

rearranging words

I guess it is not rare to come across those "rearranging words" exercises during language lesson. So yesterday during Malay class, we had this worksheet and one question was like this:

susu / saya / minum / suka / kucing

The so-called correct answer should be:
Kucing saya suka minum susu
(my cat likes to drink milk)
But have you imagined other possibilities? Such as...
Saya suka minum susu kucing
(I like to drink cat milk)or
Kucing suka minum susu saya
(Cat likes to drink my milk)
Hur hur hur.
We shouldn't curb creativity.

ratio harmony

Recently the printed media, especially the free newspaper, has been talking about the gender ratio in matchmaking activities. It is said that the ratio of male members to female members is roughly 4:6, and that many-a-times activities have to be cancelled cos there are not enough males attending. On the contrary, the ratio of males to females in online dating / matchmaking sites is about 6:4.

For the case of 4:6, I think they could have gone ahead with the activities. Fine, I’m a guy, but what’s wrong with more girls talking to less guys? Even with a 1-1 matching, you can’t guarantee they can hit off, can you? And if you have the x-factor that others don’t have, who knows, you may not be at the “losing end” after all. Even the universities here don’t have 1-1 ratio between teaching staffs and students. (that’s so unrelated)

As for 6:4, I feel that it’s a different approach to it between males and females. Females are willing to pay for matchmaking service, while guys prefer to freeload from the free online dating sites, and yeah, some guys like to cast net. Girls seem to prefer to use a fishing line, though. A girl once told me it’s lame when guys say they are looking for both long term and short term relationship. What’s wrong with it? I can always eat tidbits and full meals.

On a related sidenote, I checked up the Singapore Department of Statistics and found that the gender ratio in 2008 is 980 males per 1000 females, compared to 982 per 1000 in 2007. Gosh, there are less and less guys each year! (or, more and more females). Of course this includes the underage and overage. I wonder if anyone is panicking.

prof who smokes

Yesterday I was supposed to have an appointment with my prof (yeah, same prof) at 4pm.
At 4pm sharp, I went knocking on his office door. No reply. But the lights were on. So I patiently waited outside for 10-15 minutes. There was still no sign of him, so I decided to come back later.
At 4:30pm, I went back to try my luck. He was in, with a girl in his office.

"I thought we are supposed to meet at 4?" He asked.
"Ya, I came at 4 but you weren't in." Please, don't try to smoke me. You are in means you are in. Vice versa.
"Oh sorry I was at a meeting. I probably came back at around 4:10pm." See? "can you come back a bit later?"
"What time will that be?"
"About 5:15" Holy crap. His version of a bit is more than 30 minutes.
"Maybe can we meet another day?" Please, once bitten twice still not shy? I won't buy this come-back-later crap again.

You know, a can of thinner is just 10 minutes walk away at the hardware shop at Fong Seng.

some word verification

This is what I saw while trying to post a comment in my blog just now:


And someone sitting beside me suggested I type the exact same word... with the dot dot dot. Didn't work. (maybe it's the capital L)

I've tried different style of comment box for this blog, either pop up, comment page, or this embedded comment field, and I kind of prefer this one, cos you can easily refer to the original post. But this one has its shortcomings: on many occasions readers told me they couldn't post comment cos it was forever loading or giving the error message, and for me, when I'm on my S60's browser it doesn't support the embedded field (or is it the other way round?)

There's no best solution. But why does the industry always talk about "best practise"?

blogging is not for the faint-hearted

Nowadays blogging also has become so damn difficult.

This morning a friend of mine told me she was asked to remove a blog post on an industrial visit. Her guess was that because some photos were being posted in the blog. Some companies just don’t like photographs leaked. I understand that the compound is private property and not a public place, and that they have every right to protect their own privacy. But in the first place, if they don’t like photographs to be flowing around on the internet, why didn’t they tell visitors nicely at the start of the visit, that phototaking is not allowed? Why let people take photos when you don’t want others to see the photos? Previously I visited an aerospace company, and upfront they told us no cameras or camera phones allowed. I like that kind of no-nonsense attitude. Not like chasing after a customer after he has left the counter.

Much as I don’t like it, I guess no point making things difficult for everyone. It sure sounds stupid to strain industrial ties just because of some blog post. Same thing when I write about friends and they don’t like it, the cursor always finds its way to the delete button. (no, I don’t mean delete friends, but delete post. Although this kind of friend you can almost consider deleting them) Of course, some of you may have known my previous experience with blogging about sensitive materials.

It is not like we are blogging irresponsibly, although we could use some negative publicity for them if they are nasty. But I just feel that we shouldn’t be dictated by others about what should and should not appear in our blog. It’s like if I stick a Gundam poster in my room, why should I be told to take it down just because you don’t like Gundam?


Do we have our rights here?

what a bulb

The other day I was at the supermarket looking at light bulbs. I was pretty amazed at the varieties of bulbs there, and the light bulbs take up almost half a row of shelves. You have different brands, and each brand has different types, different sizes, different ratings, different fittings...

An incandescent filament light bulb costs about 80 cents. A compact fluorescent bulb costs about $6. And now they have what LED bulb that costs over $10!! And they only put a display set there for the LED bulb... with this kind of price range, I believe most would choose the cheapest available, ie incandescent bulb. Then how to encourage people to switch to the greener fluorescent? Do you think they should ban incandescent bulb just like some countries do?

Anyway, an auntie at the supermarket was also looking at bulbs, and she asked me what does the words on the box mean. Something about 80% energy saving and what-not. Then I went on to explain to her what 8W means, blah blah blah... I didn't bother promoting the fluorescent light to her. I think their generation is hard to convinced, given the price tag shown.

condom - engineering product?

For our MT4003 Engineering Product Development project, we are supposed to choose a product and study its specification, design a test program for it, or generate its engineering development plan.

A group of year 3 students chose condom.

=_=

I think I've read books on the condom's design and development history (or have I?), and a lecturer from a manufacturing module did mention about how condoms are made. But how are they going to test it? Clip some load cells and connect it to wheatstone bridge? Heat test? Wind tunnel test? Stretch it to yield point?

Maybe today (Valentine's Day) is a good day for them to test it. But please, don't do a destructive test on live specimens.

nus career fair 2009

I just went for NUS Career Fair 2009 today. The feelings and expectations I carried with me were different from last year, as last year I was casually looking for internship (I had cleared it in 2007 by the way), but this year I'm seriously looking for a real job.

Some of the companies that showed up last year aren't here this year, some of the companies which aren't hiring but still show up. Not going to name them, have enough of companies blocking me in their network. It's apparent how the job market has changed over time.

Oh, I bumped into an old classmate of mine at the career fair. She's actually manning a booth, and I happened to be interested in the company. So I asked her, "really hiring ah?" At least that company isn't just there to show face but not hiring.

Interestingly, this year I didn't take any free goodies compared to previous years. Maybe I have learned that taking these notepads and pens and big paperbags won't guarantee me a job.

The career fair will still be on on Friday 13th. (gosh)

site visit at sembawang shipyard

Fellow mechanical engineering coursemate xin dragged me on a hot date (aka site visit) at Sembawang Shipyard yesterday. It proved to be an eyeopener for me (the shipyard that is, don't think dirty! You know which dirty I'm referring to)

I used to kayak in the Johor Straits and passing by Sembawang Shipyard from the seaside, so this trip on land kind of completed the experience for me. The shipyard is really an impressive place, with the gigantic King George VI dry dock and some World War 2 era workshops. At the time of visit there were oil rigs, container ship, a few FPSOs (Floating Production Storage and Offloading), among other ships in the floating docks.

The staffs who guided us around were very knowledgeable as well. It was a very nice site visit with all the big machines, and it's always good to know more about one of the important industrial sites of Singapore. The marine industry is a big pie ok!

(image from http://www.sembcorpmarine.com.sg/index.php?page=sembawang-shipyard)

chatting about student media

Yesterday I had a little chat with Dr Daniel Reimold at NUS Arts canteen. Dr Reimold is a visiting scholar at the Singapore Internet Research Centre, Nanyang Technological University.

The good thing about choosing Arts canteen, is that if I say bad things about engineering, the engin guys are out of earshot; if I say bad things about arts, well I seldom hang around in Arts, so they won't be able to catch me also. Could have chosen Business or Law school as well.

Dr Reimold's interest is in student media. Since blogging is often regarded as a new media, our conversation was pretty much centred on the theme. Some of the discussions were quite thought provoking, things that I normally won't say publicly on my blog (oopz), things that I usually won't spare an extra nanosecond to think about. In a way it also helped me to think about the "why"s and "what"s of me writing stuffs in this little space of mine. At first I was really worried that a social media goondu like me would have nothing much to offer in the discussion. But in the end I really enjoyed the chat! (erm, I hope I didn't bore Dr Reimold)

After the chat at the canteen, we were waiting for the shuttle bus at the bus stop, and there we heard this 2 girls sitting behind talking about blogging. Dr Reimold and I shot each other an eye signal :P I was kinda amused, and wonder if the girls had picked up our conversation and started their own version of it.

To find out more about what Dr Reimold is doing, you can check out http://collegemediamatters.com/

2008 mobile phone ranking from gogo

I'm not so much of a handphone kind of person, but nevertheless it's still an engineering/design product.

Recently I chanced upon this 2008 mobile phone ranking by 手機 GoGo, a Taiwanese website on mobile phone. Sorry it's in Traditional Chinese, and I don't do translation here. Don't ask me anything, I'm a noob. Do you see anything that you haven't seen in local market?

Anyway, I wonder how do they have so much to write about mobile phones, that they can have a magazine for it?

luxury shameful or luxury shameless

Last week I was talking about seeing a student wearing Rolex to class. And today's newspaper talks about luxury shame. If you want to find out more about "luxury shame", Newsweek has an article on it.

Whether it was a real authentic oyster or just a jellyfish, it doesn't matter. It definitely wasn't a $20 Casio.

So in times like this, is there anything wrong spending your money away? Some may term it insensitive, but I guess if it's your money (or pocket money given by your father) then it's none of my business. It's not like me paying for your new handbags or new gadgets.

In fact, some think that we should encourage spending. Look at it this way. Motorcars can be seen as a luxury. When people don't buy cars, look at what's happening to the automobile industry? You won't die if you don't drink coke, but if you don't drink coke, they may have to "streamline" their workforce. (just an example, nothing's gonna happen to coke) When these spenders don't spend, the workers end up being the ones suffering.

And so, the working class should leech on these people! Don't bother having eyes red over other people spending money. Exploit the rich back.

lousy densha otoko

Last Friday I was on the way home from NTU. A cute girl boarded the train and sat beside me. She was carrying a very cute tote bag, and an Acer laptop. From the corner of the eye I could see her wearing a pair of white shorts, and a cute pair of shoes. Think she was wearing a red/white checkered shirt... From the reflection of the window I could see her having short hair, side parting on the left. Occasionally she would brush her hair back to the right side... (and then I wonder was she looking at me from the reflection as well)

yada yada... so along the journey she took out her cute Acer laptop and started typing away... and me having nothing to do also took out my NUS diary to check my schedule. (Loser, digital vs analog) Think she did glance at my diary. yada yada... once in a while her elbow brushed past my arm.... yada yada...

She was sniffing slightly. I should have offered my tissue paper to her (with my email address)

Then she alighted at Khatib. 5:15pm.

ok, end of story.

By the way, there was another girl sitting on my right, who was putting on make-up in the train. Glad she wasn't shaving her legs too.

don't abandon the pet after chinese new year

It's more than 10 days into the Chinese New Year, have you finished up all the snacks and tidbits and pastries? Whether you have or have not finished up the food, have you disposed of all those plastic PET containers?

Maybe we should consider keeping them for next year. I suppose if you celebrated Chinese New Year this year, you will be celebrating next year too, right? So, why not keep the plastic containers and reuse them next year? I'm sure polyethylene terephthalate doesn't degrade THAT fast. I remember seeing those refill version of snacks and tidbits when I was doing my Chinese New Year shopping. Furthermore, by keeping the containers you can have a rough gauge how much to buy next year.

We have refill for handwash, for detergent, for toilet roll (you don't buy a new rack everytime you finish a roll, do you?), why not for food too?

ntu library infiltrated

Today I went to NTU to use the lab. Don't keep giving me that shocked look when I say my lab is in NTU. If they can have visiting professor, why not visiting undergraduate?

Maybe I'm a little desperate with the lack of progress in my FYP and info in the Central Library, so I decided to check out their Lee Wee Nam Library. Hey it's a tourist attraction ok! In fact, I like it a lot, the rotunda gives it that library feel, and the superb view into the live-firing area, wow. Of course, I found books that I can't find back in NUS (and of course NUS has books that they don't have).

Somehow, they didn't implement the tap-card system at the entrance, so practically any Tom, Dick and Harry can go in, unlike NUS where every library you have to tap your matric card to gain entrance. *shrug* Knowledge shared is knowledge squared. Argh, but who would go all the way there, you think like "Journey to the West" just to get a scroll?

Didn't snap any photo inside, if not I would have looked like a pervert.

train couple

After "Bus Uncle", Hongkongers never fail to bring us entertainment on the public transport. Now, "Train Couple"!


From what I gather from the clip, the couple was seated on the MTR train, and I believe the woman's foot touched a standing passenger's pants. There goes~ Take note of the rich vocabulary used in the crossfire, the woman even used English phrases. Impressive. Do watch till the end of the clip as you will hear more colourful terms (no vulgarities, don't worry).

Many-a-times we see passengers sticking out their legs on the train or bus. Usually I'll just "accidentally" step on them or bulldoze my way. Saves saliva.

Seems like moronic commuters know no borders.

jumping to channel 5

Have you ever wondered why are there Channel 5 and 8 in Singapore's TV station list, but no 1-4, and where's 6 and 7? I thought they are so advanced they start counting from 5.

So recently I got this question answered. It's actually an international standard for Very High Frequency (VHF) broadcasting. The channels start with 2 (yes, 2, not 1) at 54 MHz, up to channel 13 at 216 MHz, each channel having a bandwidth of 6 MHz. Then it will continue to UHF (unrelated to UHT milk) with channel 14 at 470 MHz and channel 69 at 806 MHz. If you bother to do the maths, you can calculate what is the frequencies MediaCorp is broadcasting at for its channels.

Come to think of it, why didn't they name the channels with a name instead of numbers here?

night vision

Due to the structure of our vision system, human beings tend to have poorer vision at night compared to in the day. (I can bore you with details about photoreceptor cells) To overcome this problem, people have invented the night vision goggles.

Night vision equipment used to be mostly used by the military, so I was quite surprised when I saw stores selling night vision goggles. Other than in the battlefield, a few peacetime applications I can think of are camping, hunting, maybe some wild-animals watching and academic purposes. I guess the possibilities are endless. It’s just a tool, it’s up to how the people want to use it.

cheaper than hourly rate hotel

This guy took my chair at the Central Library.

Right, I don't own the chair, cos my name isn't on it. But what about me settling down at the chair, placing my bag beside it, then went to the shelves to look for books, and returned to find a guy sleeping on the same chair? Yeah, he pulled the chair slightly away from the original spot, so it looked like my bag wasn't beside it anymore.

He's far from being the only guy sleeping in the library. While moving from shelf to shelf to look for books, I found many similar sights at level 4 of NUS Central Library. Most of these guys don't have books or stationery with them, it looked as if their only purpose in the library was to sleep! I do agree that maybe we get tired after reading for a while, but at least if you hug a book or something, it looks more convincing.

Sure beat opening a room at an hourly rate hotel at Pasir Panjang Road. (and I have heard "hot" stories happening inside the library)

apa baru

I had my second Malay Language tutorial today and it's a different tutor.

It's the nama saya crap all over again.

Ok for this course we have 2 tutorial classes per week, and in my case, both are under different tutors. It seems a little unstructured, all the intro and admin repeated and under different hands, but I guess the rationale behind is that they want us to practise the language more within the tutorial time. It's like if you take the MRT often enough, you also will know ௯ (ஒன்பத) (onpathu) from "onpathu onpathu onpathu" is nine.

By the way, today's tutor is cute. Pedas! (and sedap?)

apa atas

tutor: nombor matric (insert alien language here)

me: (WTF! apa kentut)
nama saya chillycraps
saya dari fakulti kejuruteraan
saya pelajar tahun empat
saya tinggal di (insert some arbitrary place)

(translate: my name is chillycraps
I am from engineering faculty
I am a year 4 student
I live in ___)

During my Malay Language tutorial, the tutor called us by our matric number IN MALAY! It is like army all over again. And when you are lost you really feel like saying "simi lan simi lan simi lan!"

But I guess it's a good way to force us to learn. When it comes to learning a new language, you really have to practise lots, be shameless and thick-skinned. Soft shell crab doesn't have too thick a skin.

When the tutor asked us why do we want to learn Malay, I really wanted to answer "cos I want more portion when I buy lunch from the Malay stall (aka flirt with the Malay aunties...)"

gas saver net

This is another of those products that you can hardly find on the racks of department stores.

Some call it the gas saver net, or gas energy saver, it's basically a net made of metal wires arranged like bicycle spokes. All you have to do is to place it on your gas hob, and it is supposed to help you save gas. From the description it says the net can increase the burning temperature from 660-800 degrees celsius to 1000-1200 degrees celsius; save on 38% gas; reduce carbon monoxide from 0.18% to 0.026%; cook food 14% faster.

Seriously I have no idea if all these claims are true, but I can say that it really helps to prevent the flame from being blown out and leading to gas leak. How so? Well the net is already heated till red hot, so if the flame got blown out, the gas from the hob can still be ignited by the hot metal net. If I seriously want to test its efficiency, I will have to do a little experiment boiling water and timing it.

Now here is a little clip I took with the net, before my phone almost got melted cos it's black and absorbs thermal radiation. Argh my eyes!

magnetic window cleaner

Have you come across those magnetic window cleaner thingy which allows user to clean both sides of the window without sticking any body part out?

I know spring cleaning is over, but it seems like a smart design, no more commando trick for maids. All you have to do is place one on either side of the glass, move the one on the inner side and the magnet will drag the outer one along. I find it weird that you can only find them on sale at street side promoters but not in major department stores.

The other day I was at a family friend's house, and I saw a mini version of the magnetic cleaner at the fish tank. I toyed around with it, and evil me tried to switch the polarity of the magnet and did a rail gun at unlucky passerby fish (you know, like poles repel). I was kind enough not to calculate the repulsive magnetic force. Not very nice to harm people's fish during Chinese New Year.