Hui Bin

IHG 2016/17

Ask me what I know about weiqi and I’ll tell you all I know is that it’s a board game that uses black and white pieces. And that it’s a killer mind game. So when my friend came to me and asked me to play for the hall, I honestly have no idea why I agreed.

Perhaps if it was chinese chess or english chess, I might have stood a better chance. But this is weiqi, a game where your choices are close to unlimited. Besides the fact that I had zero training in my life. I certainly liked my odds better in my studies, which is already at the lowest possible state. So I had a crash course in the rules a day before the competition. taught by my friend. We started out fine, till enough people came along and then we got distracted and started playing bridge. Following which, more people came along and we played this game which I forgot the name but sounds like spy.

Review of Y1S1

Mixed feelings. That is how I will describe my thoughts upon seeing my results.

I wouldn’t say I did very badly, just mildly surprised by my grades. Some of the modules turned out as I had predicted, some did not. This led me to come to the conclusion – never underestimate what you think is manageable and at the same time, there is no need to worry too much over a paper you find too tough. Unless of course you completely have no confidence for that paper. Then you should start praying.

Grade Analysis

Astronomy

Expected Grade: B+
Actual Grade: B+
Comments: No doubt this paper is one of the most cutthroat competitive for this Sem 1. After flunking CA2 (which they conveniently did not release the quiz results), I lowered my expectations to a B+. This module was my first paper for the finals, so I spent a rather significant amount of the study period mugging for this paper. Too much, if you ask me. Lesson learnt here is to really recap each week’s lesson for content heavy modules before you start to lag behind.

The End of Y1S1

In my previous post, I hoped for a manageable last paper. In a way, that was somewhat true. Perhaps it was the last paper for this semester, or perhaps it was the fact that I tried my best and gave it all I had, I came out of the exam hall feeling quite relieved. Although I subsequently found out that my answers were not entirely correct, at least my approach was on the right track. Some method marks there please?

November is Ending

Time seems to be on drugs, speeding by ever so fast. The one week study break is over and in two days time I will be taking a major exam for the first time in 2.5 years. It’s almost as if I had forgotten what it was like to be a student. What I have on hand now makes A levels seem like a walk in the park, which itself made O levels a big delicious piece of chocolate cake with extra cherry toppings.

The challenge is just the much higher difficulty level, but also the volume of content. Basically it’s like taking a year’s worth of knowledge and compressing it into half a years time. Combine that with vague phrasing and trickier questions to provide a double blow. The finishing move would be that there is no actual answers to the past year papers. The best strategy for me was always to practice and learn along the way. The past year papers and solutions are quite limited, about 3 years worth. But that’s not a problem. The real problem is that the suggested answers are sometimes so ridiculously deviated from common sense that it makes their credibility appear next to zero.

What Sorcery Is This

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All my life, I have believed that the world runs on a fixed set of rules. Something simple, elegant and makes sense. Like 1 + 1 = 2. Or gravity makes an apple fall on someone’s head. So, by the same set of rules, I would assume that in the context of a student, the easier a paper, the higher one should score for the test.

I mean, assuming equal amounts of effort ware invested in the papers, the results should be inversely proportional to the difficulty of the paper. I could almost say for certain that I spent the same amount of time studying for each of my tests, and I expected to score higher for the modules that were easier (Astronomy, Aerospace,etc). After all, the killer modules most people (me included) fear would be mathematics 2 and dynamics. Many a nights were spent re-reading the lecture notes and textbooks, in a futile attempt to grasp the knowledge that eludes me.

The Egg Experiment

Some time back, I was considering whether it was possible for me to buy a pack of eggs and finish them all in 5 days. No more waking up in the morning and contemplating what to have for breakfast. Just eggs. After all, eggs can be considered a superfood, given their high nutritional value. Furthermore, eggs are one of the best sources of protein, which I figured I really required since I lost quite a bit of muscle mass since the army days.

Burning Out

This is just the second week of the first ever semester of my university life. Perhaps its the adjustment phase, or that my brain has been hibernating for too long. Faced with the pile of lecture notes, online lectures and tutorials, I feel like I’m reading Greek!

When I received my timetable, I found out that I only had 9 AUs when everyone else I know has 18 or 21 for those with minors or double degrees. That is because I have been exempted from 3 modules (physics, math and econs). Apparently they think that since I read them in JC and gotten an A, there is no need for me to sit through the paper again.

Do I actually need to read those modules again? How much do I actually remember and how much content have I retained post JC?

MAE Camp

Went for the orientation camp organised by the school. My roommate who is also in the same camp kindly offered to send there. No way I would be there by the required reporting time of 8am otherwise.

Journey to the School

I never expected to reach pulau ntu on time. Even more so when my friend Y told me he will be late. When he did arrive, there was the usual morning jam and the few traffic accidents only made the journey longer. When we finally arrived, we were late by a grand total of 1 hour. Surprisingly, the event has yet to start!

July 2016

Server Down?

It has been quite some time since my last post. I originally planned to write an update mid July, however when I tried to login to my site, I kept getting the timeout error. So I gave up, thinking that the server is experiencing issues again. However, when I returned the next day to try again, I got the same timeout error.

When I tried accessing the web host’s main page, the same timeout error stared back at me. And so, for the past few weeks, I have been trying to access the page. Until today. I went to the web host’s twitter page and noticed that there was no tweet on any downtime. Which means the server is running fine. Scrolling down to other’s tweets, I found some tweets where other users were complaining that there IP was banned by the host. So a thought struck me. What if my IP was similarly banned thus the server would continuously refuse my connection each time I tried to access the site?

May 2016

May is the only month, other than February, to have a less than 5 day work week. For me at least. Now that the workload is down to more than manageable levels, I find myself more breathing room. For the first time in months, I am finally able to spare a little time on my hobbies, which feels great really. I had my monitor color calibrated, which would certainly help in the post processing of photographs. Seeing my previous photographs edited on a non-calibrated screen now seems awful.