Staying at my aunt house

After being asked repeatedly prof KBC to look for somewhere near to stay, I moved to my aunt place. Being staying w my aunt n grandma for 2 weeks, sleeping in the living room. Here are some interesting stuff I discover.

1. I can still fall asleep without aircon. I last time I slept w/o aircon is during bmt. good that I have yet to become too dependent on aircon.

2. Cant get used to having a maid in house, which my aunt happen to have, to look after my grandma n cousins. When I wake up in the morning, after washing up, I discovered that my bed is already kept, milo is prepared n when I am going off, she open the door for me. Cant stand these good life. Have to rush out of the toilet to keep the bed. Dont tell her that I am leaving house so early. Milo cant help it cos i dont know where the milo tin is kept.

3. Microwave is cool. My house dont have one but my aunt has. Everything can be just put into the microwave and food is served.

4. SH was upset when I told him yesterday that I am going back to drink soup instead of having dinner w him. hehe. My grandma saved soup for me at night. If she cooked herbal tea, I will have a bottle saved.

5. Most impt, it is quite near to NUS, 7 bus stops away from GH. Now, I wake up at 7 am, take the 7.30 am bus 197 to NUH n take A1 or bus 95 to computer center. Furthermore, I can stay in atheneum till 11+ pm, take the 11.34 or 11.45 pm bus 33 back home.

海上升明月 天涯共此时

worst mid-autumn festival as far as i can remember.

first, my cousin flew to US yesterday morning at 4 am, will be gone for 1 mth. Asked her to fly after the festival but she say cant, cos she has to start work on the coming mon. Then my grandparents n parents received a invitation to attend a dinner at the association. Some form of religious assoication. the date is fixed by the god, seem like the god want to see everybody on mid-autumn day. As a results, my aunites n cousins are all not coming over to my house for mooncake this year. My bro decide to back to ntu this afternoon, meaning i have to spend the night all alone.

Coupled with the roller coaster ride in feelings n mood this week, this week is not my week.

Decide to work myself hard to forget everything. But the NUS server has to choose this weekend to shut down for maintance, w/o any email notice or whatever. I saw some form of notice from IVLE. I left my files at the PC at atheneum n cant remote log in from house. Even doing work has become a near impossibility.

The only thing left is to go to my grandmother (mum side) house for dinner n mooncake. At least there will be some festival mood there. Tmrw has no class, but i will go back sch to study. Studying is better than thinking too much.

人有悲欢离合，月有阴晴圆缺，此事古难全。 但愿人长久，千里共婵娟。

Cantonese Opera

I have a interest in Cantonese Opera (HM called them 粤语残片), learned it from my 2 grandmothers, both cantonese. I remember that my grandmother had a cantonese opera tape. i used to watch it almost everytime i was at my grandmother house, think have watched it no lesser than 50 times. But that was very long ago, during pri sch times, cant remember what the show was already, only remember that name was 三笑姻缘, 任剑辉 and 白雪仙 are the main actors, one of the actoress was 肥肥 沈殿霞 and there is a line in which say something like "求神 求神 诚心........ ".

This tape become my first love for cantonese opera, which i forgot all abt till JC. One night, i was watching TV with my parents n the show was 三笑姻缘, 黄梅调 style. Then i recall that tape that my grandmother had and ask my mum where it is. She replied that the tape was spolit many years ago n thrown away. That night, i decide to renew my childhood interest in cantonese opera. Luckily my grandmother (another grandmother, father side) has a few cantonese opera cassette tapes and I started listening to them.

Cantonese Opera continue to be my interests, with 帝女花 and 紫钗记 being my favourite. Below is the partial script for 紫钗记, a love story b/w a guy who picked up the purple hairpin dropped by the gal. (must read in cantonese)

----------

小玉唱: 半遮面儿弄绛纱，半飞桃红泛赤霞。拾钗人会薄命花，钗贬洛阳价，落拓江都会司马。
小玉（白）: 秀才还我钗。

李益唱: 此亦缘份也，他生缘份也。借钗作媒问，愿拜愿拜石榴裙，奉上珠钗定婚嫁。

小玉唱: 初见面两不相识到此实惊怕，羞听蝶恋花。历劫不可是千金价，落拓不配攀司马，亲恩不报未能受礼茶。

李益唱: 莫弃郎才华，风霜百劫李十郎未有家，仰慕你才华在衡阳曾独霸。

小玉唱: 偷忆诗中句，梦常伴柳街。心暗自爱慕他，莫非三生缘份也。自觉辛酸自惭被贬花，破落那堪共郎话。

李益唱: 休说被贬花，他朝托夫婿名望，终有日吐扬眉话。

小玉唱: 烟雨韶华，空对才华，惊怕命似秋霜风雨断爱芽，惊怕落拓笙歌空说玉有暇。唉！太羞家。

李益唱: 历劫珍珠不怕浪里沙，你嫁与我十郎罢。

小玉唱: 伴母深闺须奉茶。哎呀！我如何能便嫁。

联合早报

Finally finished reading all the zao bao that have been piling up since National Day. I read the zao bao everyday, except the exam period. Since 9 Aug, I stopped reading zao bao to mark the sign of preparing for exams.

Since 3 Sep, where unofficially the last semester ended, I have been reading back all the zao bao i missed. pple must be looking at me on the bus n mrt, thinking what is this guy doing, reading newspapers that are weeks old.

JJ and JL have wonder why my command of the Chinese language is so good. The answer is simple, I read zao bao everyday. Actually my command of Chinese is not that good. Verbal is still ok. I dont think I can write Chinese now. Since JC, Chinese has became a verbal language to me. Last year, my JC teacher asked me to write an article to recommend Mr Tan AT for the Chinese Teachers' Award or something like that. I though of what to write in Chinese, everything is planned ok, till i start writing. It was such a pain, I cant remember even the most simple Chinese characters. Checking the words in Han Yu Pin Yin is such a chore that I finally gave up. Translate my thoughts into English and type it out. Article done in 1 hr.

Not only that I read the zao bao daily, I surf http://news.phoenixtv.com/ too. In the past when I was freer, I read the HK Ming Pao, US NYTimes and Washington Post too. I had a cupboard of newspaper clippings that I keep since NS, they shaped my thinking and way of life. I classified then into 文化, 生活, 科技 and 政治. I now have 8 files full of them.

Butterflies

Zhuang zi used to have a dream where he dreamed that he became a butterfly. When he woke up, he wonder whether was it he dreaming himself as a butterfly or the butterfly dreaming itself to be Zhuang zi. (for more info, refer to 庄子:齐物论)

I had a dream in the atheneum last afternoon. sleeping on the chair, I found myself unable to stand up from the chair. Thought that some evil spirits were playing tricks on me and I was there chanting when all of the sudden, I woke up. There I was, wondering whether that part where I was unable to stand up from the chair, was I dreaming or was it real??

Firstly, the environment of the "dream" was exactly the same as where I was physically. Secondly, I always have a habit of able to know whether I am dreaming or not, especially those horrible dreams. I can always realise that I am dreaming and will keep telling myself in the dream "I am dreaming, quick wake up". In short, I am able to force myself to wake up when I am having bad dreams. In this "chair dream", I am not able to detect that I am dreaming.

The interesting thing is, after I woke up from this "dream", if it really is a dream, I went back to sleep. hehe, just too tired man.

Ending summer semester, starting fall semester...

Finally, the summer semester ended unofficially on 3 Sep 05 and the fall semester starts officially on 7 Sep 05. The summer semester was a killer. Hopefull the fall semester will not be that bad, (although I strongly think that it can only be worse).

Some thoughs and views of the 1st semester in the SMA CE/CDO program...

Expectation

Prof Khoo told me no less than 5 times that this program will be tough. Prof Lim SC warned me that the jump from Bachelor studies to Master studies is huge. However, I think I am still not well prepared for the program when it first starts. Especially when the semester only lasts for 5 weeks, the learning curve is just too steep. When the MIT semester starts for 13 weeks, I hope it will be better.

Efficiency

I had a chat with Prof Lim during dinner and he explained how the American universities work. We are supposed to be able to do our assignments in a short period of time. Most of the time, a day or night is the only time we have. I asked a friend from MEBCS about the studies life in MIT (they went over and came back) and he told me that they are required to submit their lab report the next day and the night is the only time they have to finish whatever it is required. My friend at MIT Sloan said the same thing. Gone are the luxuries of undergraduates’ life when an assignment can take a week to complete.

I am now working on improving my efficiency to meet the new demand. Asked Lian Hing how to write report efficiency. He told me to answer to the point, don’t explain too much detail and draw plenty of flowcharts and diagrams. Smartdraw should help.

Coursework

The courses are tough, but I can see that they are mostly useful and important. However, the arrangement could be make better. For C++, the lectures by Prof Wang are very dry. I believe that he would agree that not many of us are paying attention. Half of the class bought the C++ textbook to self-read when Prof Wang starts teaching. For Prof Wang’s lab, he told us that we need not do a particular coding because it is too tough. However, the TA who mark our report minus marks from us because of that. There is a method that fulfill the requirement to a lesser extend and some of the class did it. But the point is we didn’t do it because Prof Wang told us not to.

For MPI, professors try their best to teach and we try our best to listen. But I think I didn’t absorb much in class. For Prof Murali lectures, he mostly taught on iteration methods (Jacobi, GS and SOR) rather than MPI.

There are 6 labs for MPI. The 4th clab took 2 weeks to complete instead of the usual 1 week because we had a lot of difficulties understanding what the questions want and a lot of time is wasted generating answers that were not needed. The 5th clab is during the C++ final exam week. We spent the week preparing for exam instead and after that another week explaining what descretization is. Then came the Linear Algebra final exams and time is spent preparing for it. In the end, clab 5 only start after 25 Aug, the Linear Algebra final exam. The MPI coding used matrix-block iteration, which is fairly simple. Much of the time was spent instead on generating the matrix [A].

I personally find it peculiar as how to obtain [A] should not fall into the MPI module. It is hard to get [A] but this will be covered in the MIT modules. This is why the whole class spent so much time on Clab 5, trying to produce [A] rather than coding on MPI, which told up only about 10% of the efforts. In the end, we finished clab 5 on 1 Sep. There is still clab 6 which is due on 2 Sep, which the TA has kindly extended to 3 Sep noon. Clab 6 involved using build-in codes and no time was available to read into it. Hence, for the 1st time in NUS, I submitted an incomplete report. ScaLAPACK was just too tough to understand and pooling all resources together, none of us finished that question. In the end, we have only a break of 3 days (4 to 6 Sep) to recharge for the MIT semester.

Preparation

I don’t know much about this program. I don’t have a very clear idea of the difference between Computation Design and Optimization. It was only when Prof Willcox gave us a summary that I understand where this program is going. It will be good to give us an outline of the program especially when we are from different background. Especially the NUS student, before the program actually starts, we have a month break. It will be good if the reference texts are disclosed earlier to start reading. I was reading “Fluids Mechanics” by Frank White during the break which doesn’t seem to be very helpful now.

Why the program is worth the hard work

Our program is much tougher than the rest of the SMA programs. It will give students more drive to push through it if there is more encouraging news. Prof Jacob White told us that the CE students get a higher pay in industry than the CS students. Prof Khoo told us that our MIT Master’s is research based while the rest of the programs are course based. We get to spend 8 months in MIT while the other only get either 3 weeks or 4 months. It will be much better if this encouraging news is told to us right at the start of the program. My younger brother told me a few weeks ago that he saw the SMA seminar in NTU and he told his friends not to join this program because he saw me reaching home almost everyday at 11 pm plus to eat dinner. haha


-------

New semester started, 4 MIT modules, 3 w/o final exams. this means that there will be alot of assignments and projects. I used to spent 90% of my time on studies during undergraduates. Now I think I have to spent 95%. There wont be time to do anything else... but what to do??

Friends

I think most pple only heard of the song 《朋友》 by 周华健. But I personally prefered this 《朋友》 by 谭咏麟. Note, this song has to be sing in cantonese for best effects.

《朋友》歌词:

繁星流动 和你同路
从不相识 开始心接近
默默以真挚待人
人生如梦 朋友如雾
难得知心 几经风暴
为着我不退半步 正是你
遥遥晚空点点星光息息相关
你我那怕荆棘铺满路
替我解开心中的孤单
是谁明白我
情同两手一起开心一起悲伤
彼此分担不分我或你
你为了我 我为了你
共赴患难绝望里 紧握你手
朋友

窈窕淑女

Cant remember what happen, i was discussing something w sun wei n i called her shu 女. got a killer look from her n was threaten to be tied to a tree and canned. Later then realise that i was refering to 窈窕淑女 that 淑女 while she thou i was saying 熟女 (i pronounced wrongly), which means 30+ mature lady, those very close to auntie type. No wonder she is so piss.

Went back n check my 最新现代汉语大字典, actually quite old already, had it seen sec 1. renew my chinese:

shu(1) nu 淑女- the 1st peom of 诗经: 周南·关雎, 关关雎鸠　在河之洲　窈窕淑女　君子好逑 参差荇菜　左右流之　窈窕淑女　寤寐求之 求之不得　寤寐思服　悠哉悠哉　辗转反侧 参差荇菜　左右采之　窈窕淑女　琴瑟友之 参差荇菜　左右流之　窈窕淑女　钟鼓乐之. meaning? check google, althou i personally prefered this peom:

凤兮凤兮归故乡，遨游四海求其凰。时未遇兮无所将，何悟今兮升斯堂！有艳淑女在闺房，室迩人遐毒我肠。何缘交颈为鸳鸯，胡颉颃兮共翱翔！凰兮凰兮从我栖，得托孳尾永为妃。交情通意心和谐，中夜相从知者谁？双翼俱起翻高飞，无感我思使余悲。

shu(2) nu 熟女 - Dont ever say this to any young ladies unless u want a beating from them!

if anyone is wondering why i am so free writing so many blog. the reason is i am waiting for my dad to pick me up from nus.

Shawn re-new his blog recently, so long . wonder if i ever will have time to read.

I shld re-new my fotolog too. There is also my webshot. very boring stuff, mostly abt the days i spent when i was in tokyo for my IA. both updated since 6 mths ago, i think. interestingly, i got an email from webshot yesterday that there was 50 views last week...

http://www.fotolog.net/alextanyk/

http://community.webshots.com/user/alextanyk

A long long time ago

Very long time ago, i cant remember when was the last time i submit a report that was not complete. MPI n parallel computing is a killer. The reports n codes r the killer's killer. The last lab clab 6 required us to do background reading on progam PETSc and ScaLAPACK. It was a nightmare. The TA told us to complete qn 1b n submit on the exact day. We spend 5 hrs during the labs n none of our code can compile.

After than, clab 6 was KIV due to linear algebra exam n the dateline for clab 5 was coming. Yes, 2 labs + 1 exams. clab 5 was due on 31 Aug, but hydra was getting emtional. it took me 3 days to discover that there was nothing wrong with my code n all the faults was the stupid hydra server getting EQ. cos of that, clab 5 was delayed till 1 sep. that left me w 2 days to do clab 6.

first the easier qn 1a. lot of reading of manual n playing n testing. bugged the TA constantly till when i walk out of my cubical, he auto turn his head n look at me. hehe. Finally manage to ustd the code n did some changes n runing some input. Agreed among the class, i email them all for reference. then qn 1b, killer question. make use of the inbuilt function that has 29 arguements. wonder where to start. that took till 2 sep afternoon. HM finished qn 2 n email to all of us. As a mark of protest he cc to the TA. looking at the qn, realise that it is very similar to qn 1a. what the fish?! stop qn 2 n do qn 1b first. completed the code in 2 hrs, very fast record, but realise that it give funny answer. but 12.30 am already too tired. went to bed.

today, wake up at 6.30 am, reach sch at 8.30 am. was very lucky, dont need to wait for bus or mrt. but TA not ard, write report first. first time man, writing a report when the code is still not ready yet. TA walk in at 11 am, bomb him w alot of qn. then realise that the code cant run cos the matrix input is not psd. told me to stop using CG n use ksp standard. after that, the answer is perfect.

chop chop finish the code n report. but for qn 1b, sorry, really cant do . 非不为也 实不能也. explain in the report abt compilation being successful, reading of the input is good, but the 29 argument fn is a killer.

submit the report n then realise that my qn 1a was appearing on a lot of pple report. haha, no judgement made, or else i wont send to all. the class is really tired.....

we need a good rest.

1 Sep 05

Commencement seem like very long ago. The photos i took are already washed and on my tables for years. 5 week crush course at SMA is a killer. Lost track of time and space. Trying to meet chaw siong to get the book from him but with no success cos i stay in nus till very late.

2 days ago, yuling drop an email. she lost her hp n ask us to drop her a sms. I did n she told me she is at home marking cos tmrw is teachers' day. It was only then that i realise that 1 sep is coming. It is time to send out the photos i took during commencement to the profs. I was planning to do it right after commencement, but ....... time flies.....all because of murali

I think it was in yr 2 that i start sending electronic cards to prof during teachers' day. Not all the prof, those that i knew, which make up abt 1/2 of all ME prof. Teachers has a special place in my heart. I had my own fair share of the terrible + horrible n the very good one. My Sec 3-4 chinese teacher renew my interest in chinese, which stagnated when my aunt (which is my chinese tutor for pri sch) moved to JB. My JC chinese teacher intro me to the contemporary chinese works of HK n taiwan and i never left since. (not surprising, i know almost all the chinese teacher in VJ).

My sec 3-4 english teacher was a very boring lady. Nobody in our class like her lesson. She is sensitive to chalk n never touch the blackboard (only twice in 2 yr, once with a piece of paper wrapping the chalk, n once by bare hand cos the VP was ard). In JC, 2 years w 3 GP tutors. My ang mo has never been powerful till today.

I remember in sec 3, we have a new principle and during CNY, he re-started the old tradition of every students bringing 2 oranges to school. It was to be collected and sent to the old folks home on CNY eve. It was stopped by the old principle when some parents told the press abt it, but said that the oranges r meant for the teachers. I told my ah ma abt it n she said even if the oranges r for the teachers, there is nothing wrong w it. The teacher is there to impart u knowledge and morals and the way of life. She /He is an important influence on us. Giving her/him 2 oranges on CNY eve is only a very small token of appreciation.

since young, i learned that teacher is a very influencing person in your life. they can make or break u. It is only right to show respect n appreciation to those who gave u so much. For the good teachers, they r something more than just coming to work n teach n get a salary. The profs i known over the past 3 or 4 years have a great impact on my life. I bother them alot, remember that prof christina lim is so glad that i am not taking any mat mod in yr 3 n 4. i seek advice from them alot, look for prof khoo, prof lim, prof leng, prof liu no less than 10 time regarding sma, a* or ngs. Prof Chew gave alot of advice abt the tough working life. Prof Cheng tuaght me the way to do research, she asked me once to explain a concept to the class in LT7 but i declined, too scary, haha. Prof lim CT told the interesting field of life sci, prof Vincent Tan told me abt nano n of cse prof yap taught me alot on research. Almost forgot, Prof Lim SC told me that ME still have a bright future.

Sending them a thank you card on teachers' day, i believe that i am already doing less than what i shld be doing. My bro told me that is "sa ka" to the face. but i dont mind what others think.