Swine Flu (Google Maps)

(Kudos to Bing Zhao)

Bad Taste In My Mouth

Just met my Technology World Change (TWC) professor a few hours ago to inquire why I got a B+ instead of an A; from the outset, it might appear to be "kiasuism" but I believed I did relatively well so I really had to know why I got that grade so I could 'RIP'.

And the meeting confirmed my thoughts that I did well, at least on a personal level. The problem was... while most universities are exams-heavy, SMU has a more all rounded curriculum with group projects playing a significant part. And it turned out that I got screwed by my projects, in particular the parts my groupmates did.

And that left such a bad taste in my mouth for the past few hours that I couldn't help but come online and rant about it. The thing is that you can always control what you are to do easily, but it's not easy to control what others do.

Also, while the often suggested alternative of plainly displacing your groupmates and presenting/handling the whole project by yourself is viable, I haven't seen anyone done that in any of my classes before. That would be quite hilarious wouldn't it be? One person presenting on behalf on three. Rare sighting.

Hai. -_-

(And kudos to the professor. He was willing to review the results of each individual and tell them what went wrong. It's a tough task as some students can be unreasonable.)

Edit: And group mates, if you all ever see this, it's nothing personal really. If anything, it's just about work, not character.

Perhaps I should had been more *evil* and said that your respective work wasn't fantastic (or should I not?). Perhaps I should had just found some other way around it. Oh well.

Uh-Oh

Source: BBC/WHO. Red for confirmed and Orange for unconfirmed.



Maybe I'm just paranoid. Maybe.

Swine Flu

If you haven't caught news of it, here is the (re)arrival of the swine flu. Some quick facts from Wiki:

1. The flu is probably the combination of the North American swine influenza, North American avian influenza, human influenza A virus subtype H1N1, and swine influenza virus.
   
2. The flu has been confirmed in Mexico City, California and Texas.
   

I don't know about you but I'm personally quite worried. The fact that the flu is human transmissible combined with how overcrowded Singapore is seems to make it quite the potential killer if it gets here.

Imagine if a infected person boards the MRT during the rush hour and sneezes in there... Just the thought of it frightens me.

On the bright side for students, it could mean no school for some time. However, personally, I will cull the pigs if my 3 or 3.5 years graduation plan is disrupted. Ron is currently taking summer term to clear his course in a shorter time.

Simple Wallpapers

I made some simple wallpapers for myself.











Meeeeh.

Random Observation: The MRT

(I wanted to post this a week ago. But it was exam time and I couldn't find the extra juice within to do it. So here it is)

I was going back home from an exam that ended about 6pm. And because I had to get back home asap to start studying for another exam the next day, I decided to bear with the rush hour MRT trip that I usually do my best to avoid.

For some strange reason (maybe I was trying to avoid dozing off), I started to try identifying and grouping the individuals I saw on the train. And the results were somewhat amusing to me, at least personally:

The Soduku Player
The Level 1 Sleepers - Seating
The Level 2 Sleepers - Standing
The Couples
The Indianators
The Pretty Girl - Age Uncertain
The Noisy Bunch of Kids
The Shoeless
The Dangerous Fatty
The Menacing Auntie

Some of them are classics that I have seen from young, e.g. The Level 2 Sleepers. But the fact that they are able to stand while sleeping still fazes me after all these years. -_-' The new ones that I really find amusing? The Soduku Players, The Indianators and The Dangerous Fat.

Soduku Players: For some strange reason, these people never get tired of playing Soduku. They will be on their Soduku puzzles in any imaginable ways - sitting, standing, traditional media Soduku (books, papers), digital Soduku (cellphones). Impressive. And the age of Soduku addicts range from JC kids to the white hair population. Impressive. Soon we'll see everyone march into the MRT stations each morning armed with a Soduku book each.

The Indianators: My name for the Indians who board the train from Little India. A disclaimer: not to be racist here but... they seriously have a smell that most other races cannot get accustomed to/tolerate. While that itself isn't really bad, they compound the problem by standing very close to you on the trains. For some reason, they love contact. While it's rush hour and you always want to pack the train as much as possible so everyone can get on board, having a Indianator stand beside you 6 inches away isn't fun at all. Go try it if you don't believe.

The Dangerous Fat: Perhaps the anti-thesis of The Indianators. While The Indianators want to and somehow manages to stand near people, The 'Dangerous' Fat always enjoys the most space around them for some reason. Perhaps it might be people's fear of their sweat smell (fat people usually sweat more). Perhaps it might be because of people's despise of the fat (I hope not). But anyway, all that space around them makes them seem more like bomb-carrying terrorists than anything. That's why I call them The "Dangerous" Fat. -_-'

(And again, I have nothing against fat people. I was fat once. Unfortunately (or fortunately?), fat people have always been discriminated against.)

Disgusting? Or Just Primal Needs?

I'm on the former.

What am I so disgusted about? Here's an excerpt from a BBC Article: Women at War Face Sexual Violence

...American women have fought and died in Iraq than in any war since World War II. Over 206,000 have served in the Middle East since March 2003, most of them in Iraq. Some 600 have been wounded, and 104 have died. Yet, even as their numbers increase, women soldiers are painfully alone...

...According to several studies of the US military funded by the Department of Veteran Affairs, 30% of military women are raped while serving, 71% are sexually assaulted, and 90% are sexually harassed...

I find them astonishing figures. 30% of military women are raped. Though I'm not on any front line fighting any war, I don't think any situation can ever justify such actions.

Disgusted? Quite.

Hopefully, people who exact such actions upon others get their dues.

(Edit: Interestingly, another article about this attributes the high occurrence of rape to the kind of people who join the force willingly. It says something like...

The economic reasons behind enlistment are well understood. The military is the primary path out of poverty and dead-end jobs for many of the poor in America. What is less discussed is that many soldiers enlist as teenagers to escape troubled or violent homes.

Sounds familiar. Somewhat.)

Exams Over. Yay.

Exams over. Yay. Sanity returns.

Update: Sanity should be gone again soon though. Just had a look at my schedule and it says that summer school starts in about a week and a half.

Yes. Self-inflicted. I know.

(Note: The official semesters in SMU are approximately: August to Nov and Jan to Apr. In between lies a long 4 months break.)

Wheeeeeeee. =)

How to get A+ in SMU

Oxymoron is an Oxymoron

No, I'm not a moron.

From en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxymoron

Oxymoron is a loanword from Greek oxy ("sharp" or "pointed") and moros ("dull"). Thus the word oxymoron is itself an oxymoron.

Lovely.