Wednesday 22 June 2005

Flunked

Failed driving test.. badly.. Absolutely flunked it. Didn't get to finish my route and I got 40pts. Am I that lousy?? Tester said I didn't know how to change lane at all. Every time I change lane, minus 8 points from me. wth. What I'm pissed with is why no instructor told me that I need to look at all the mirrors before I change lane?? So even if I didn't make any other stupid mistakes, I would still have failed, cos I couldn't change lanes.
Now why am I getting so emotional over this? Did it matter that much whether I pass or not? Did it matter that this girl who had the test in my session was happily holding keys that her boyfriend handed over to her after the test? What's wrong with me? Life's been too smooth? Never failed before?
Left at around 5, didn't see any instructors at all which is great. Didn't think I could talk to Ivan without breaking down. So I've decided not to retake the test. No point. Shall see how it is in California.

To sunny and others, some ideas for performance, since I'll be away for 2 weekends:
1. Stomp (storm, whatever, the one where we hit things with things to form nice rhythms) Easy, can involve everyone with slight sense of rhythm. To make things more interesting, can get some guy to rap.. haha
2. Shoot MTV in Biopolis or sth, like the Track guys did for RJ video, takes more time..
3. Sing a song, change the lyrics.. easy to involve everyone again..

Sunday 19 June 2005

YEF 2005

Just puked and nearly fainted in public. 2nd time this year. And this time's because i lost 5ml of blood. Freaking irritating.. at least i puked cleanly into the drain this time. One of the reasons why I can nv be a doc or nurse.. thought i was over this needles thing but, oh well..

OBS week.. I'd better pass my prac test, if not what a huge waste this is. Acc to the instructor yesterday I can pass, but they always say that I can pass.. Saw that Ivan instructor again, he can still recognise me with my shaggy hair.. Nice to have someone saying hi

YEF2005!! Ok, no more about puking, psyche up for YEF!! (gonna be real long, must record down the 2nd last electone concert I watch in detail, skip if you get bored.)
They were playing Mindscape as background music when xiaowei and I entered, as promo for Andoh's concert. So cool. I am definitely going for his concert. just need a date, and tickets, as usual. (Oh yeah, xw was shocked by my hair, haha, thought I got gan3 qing2 chuang4 shang1)
Participants came out dressed up. Guys in top hats, girls with masks, masquerade kind.. Funky. Really cute how the kids (6 yrs old ones) bow. =) Emcee was lousy as usual. Come on Yamaha, I'm sure there are more professional people out there who can emcee a lot better. Every concert, this woman comes out and make lousy attempts at trying to be spontaneous and funny, end up looking unrehearsed and unpro. Judges were Ms Rita Sze, Mr Jimmy Kok and chief judge Ms Ng Bie Tin.

Competition starts. It's classical this year. Junior section. Pathetique sonata, a hipper version, delivered beautifully, double pedalling that wow-ed me, I can't do that.. He got 3rd. The Cat, quite nice too, but somehow i can't remember how it sounds like.. hmm, she got 2nd. Then Lu Yun with Night On a Bare Mountain. Stunning. Flawless in my opinion. There was this part where she played Eb appegios on pedals, and it was perfect. Impressive. It was very clear that she was going to be the winner. If there was a junior IEC, she'd probably be in it.. great one

Senior section. Quite sad case this yr, only 3 people competing. Rido Yanto with Bacchanale from Samson Et Dalila. What a mouthful. The piece was difficult, no doubt, very difficult, not something I can manage. But I didn't think he played it well, slips here and there, and the piece sounded too fast for his fingers.. nervous maybe, hope he relaxes before the next round cos he won. Guess the judges saw the potential in him. 1 tip to pick up from EFs, if you wanna go on to the next step, make sure you write/ arrange your own songs.. No way u can win with a "canned" song, no matter how beautifully you play it, unless all the contestants are playing such pieces. Greensleeves, not as difficult, but much neater and very nice. Strange rhythms, thought she was off rhythm halfway but turned out that the schore was written that way. Great piece for a concert piece in IEC finals but not really as THE competition piece. She got 2nd. Rondo Capriccioso, way too much piano, I don't think it's a good idea to play piano on the electone, it's much easier than if u do it on the piano, you can have a stationary left hand and it doesn't sound any better. Maybe if it was as captivating as mr tan's piano, it would have won her some points, but well, i didn't like it. Her pedalling was good, but she lost me halfway through the piece, cos I sort of condemned the piece after the long piano part. Got 3rd.

Entertainment Category- Solo. They are all so young but very entertaining. =) 6yrs old girl played Sing. Very adorable cos she can't reach the pedals on this tall STAGEA, and she was swaying like a pendulum when she was playing. Don't think she played much, XG probably added a lot of flavours, but she sounded good. She got 5th. 12 year old boy played a Joe Hisashi piece, from animation medley, but I don't know the title, nice piece. but well, he wasn't paying attention to his expression and touch, so he got 4th. Oh yeah, he dressed up as a Jap warrior who help little insects get their homeland back. So he had to remove his helmet, put down his sword and shield before playing. Next, Jo-Adam Saiful Mizra, 6 yrs old, played James Bond Theme. 6yrs old, short, cannot reach pedals, so he stood up to play. Quite a good idea actually, he was shaking to the music when he wasn't pedalling. Very engaging piece. The right type of music to play for entertainment competition. Rhythmic familiar tunes. He won. Next 7 yrs old boy wore a mexican hat, whatever u call it and played Tequila, a latin piece. cool cos he shouted Tequila! in the middle of the piece. He got 2nd. 16yrs old girl played Circle Line. I don't like the piece, I don't like Reiko actually, so I didn't like what she played. she got 3rd. I'll kill myself if I were her.. =X

Ensemble section. The most entertaining part. Shen Qi Yi Bao, played Miracle, by the 12 Girls Band. 2 on electone, 1 dizi, 1 erhu. Sounded very good, think the dizi and erhu players are real confident, cos they're playing with electronic instruments, any bit of out of tune will be so obvious, but they pulled it off. They won best musical award and best costume. They dressed up in ancient Chinese costumes, brought paper fans up, and this guy was wearing a bian4 lian3 mask. Great outfit cos they have the perfect excuse to wear thin and soft soles shoe. Next Charmed with My Memory, this song from Winter Sonata. Think they're from Tampines, guy sang, girl accompanied. Guy had a good voice but not fantastic, girl, the dynamics a bit off. They reminded me of this guy and girl from my class. I'm biased but I do think my classmates could sound bettr than them. =X Next, I-STARS playing Hedwig's Theme. Young girls, 6 yrs old maybe? Dressed up as witches, showed 3 amazing magic tricks before playing, too bad they were doing 3 tricks all at once, and I didn't know which one to watch.. haha. They got best entertainment award. Then Latino Meeq! playing Copacabana, which happens to be the latin piece that Renee and XM played at my house. Nice. They had mo4 qi4 and they looked like they were enjoying themselves. They got best audience choice award.

Guest Performances. Sop sax playing going home acc by Sharyn Toh. He was good, really. Flute played Spain acc by Sharyn again. Piece was difficult but i didn't really like it. Melvin Png, elec guitar, acc by Sharyn and her Sparkz group, played Smoke on the Water. Actually I couldn't tell he was playing that piece. Elec guitar. hai. He's very cool, Sharyn looked really good, but the others were, um, well, erm, let's just say, not that comfortable with those shaking. Anyway i think this is the only piece Sharyn needs to practise. The other few just memorise, and since she probably written them herself, just improvise and look pretty. Then Sparkz played Sway and Bad Boy. Kinda hard to tell who's playing what when they are facing the audience instead of the keyboards facing us.
I'm still fascinated by all those sound effects during the changing of pieces. Did they come from the Stagea, it's probably MIDI or XG or even recordings, nope, should be MIDI. If they did come from Stagea, how does it stop exactly at the start of the piece? Unless it's all timed and recorded in the tracks. no idea..

Entertaining evening. I will go for Andoh's concert, just need a date and tickets. If you're interested to go with me, let me know, I'll prob order tickets this week. Gosh, I've been blogging for an hour.. Need to drink more water, think I'm dehydrated from puking.. urgh..

Saturday 18 June 2005

Blog surfing

Found many blogs.. 2 years changed many people

In random order
pamela
rosanne
carol
laura
meiqi
meizhen
yuan ting
linling
jiamin
junrong

That's about it.

Friday 17 June 2005

Celine is leaving.. so sad.. Actually, Celine has left. Sad cos we just lost a super duper friendly officer, nice and cheery person, but as always, I must and will respect people's decisions.. Well, H is actually quite alright, think what happened the last time was some broke down in communications somewhere..

RI tours today.. Saw the huge difference in the institutes. Think we should meet the people, watch what they do, understand what the RI do, instead of looking at the facilities. IMCB tour was good cos we got to meet the person instead of just being introduced to the facilities. Glad that BTI was first thing in the morning, if not everyone would have fallen asleep. No offence to Dr Choo at all.. =) He's a great papa.

Went BTI after everything was over. The atmosphere was great. Ah-bu is taking up AGS, i don't know where and how, but she was preparing for GRE with Andre and SN.. GRE words are really crazy. I've never heard of them at all. Especially since they're using a Barron's wordlist. nuts. Met Mimmi. She's pretty, great figure, blonde. Dave was, as Sylvia and I agreed, drooling over her. Zhong se qing you. Really. Hung around for a while, wished Andre happy birthday, complained about the day a bit and went home..

Really sad that Celine is leaving. And very irritated by the school, which has receivied my stuff 17 days back and didn't bother to update and validate my records. Very scared that I won't receive my I-20 in time.. I'm a J. I can't stand things bothering me. Urgh.

Tuesday 14 June 2005

Went Endau-Rompin national park or whatever it's called over the weekend with my mom, her colleagues and sunny. Bumpy roads with holes and elephant shit all over, hiking and seeing bamboo plants trampled by elephants, crossing numerous narrow suspension bridges, really cold water, and floating down the river in boats.. There's an amazing variety of insects there. Usually you'll only find ants and mosquitoes in the house, an occasional cockroach or moth maybe. There, even indoors, there are all those plus all sorts of beetles, had a nice time observing the insects before squishing some of them. There were too many to squish them all.

Best part of the trip, beautiful place, great activities, ok weather.. Worst part of trip, always have to go begging for food cos they have communication problems all the time and somehow or other, the message that we need food never ever got to the chef, so we had fried rice for dinner and fried instant noodles for breakfast. Fried instant noodle, have u seen such a thing? The guy made the noodles so short, it's like rice, but tastes good =)

Oh yeah, our guide was a small girl. Couldn't be more than 15 years old. But she's so much more pro than all of us. Wore sandals, didn't need to bring anything, not even water while we had a 1.5l bottle of water each which we all gulped down during the hike. We must have looked so clumsy to her..

Pre-departure activities.. oops, not supposed to talk abt scholarship but heck, i'm going to say good things. Even though there's still loads of probs with the school, i'm more looking forward to going to school now. And I feel slightly relieved because apparently I'm not lagging very much in the app stuff. The US schs are just real slow. Don't feel too confident abt school though.. i might just sink into depression during the first term, can't cope, get below 3.6 and that's it...

Anyway it's quite fun. Visited SHATEC today, never knew there's a hotel/ tourism school in Singapore. But come to think of it, there must be one right? If not where did all the chefs come from? Dining etiquettes were cool, cooking was messy and I'm glad the students helped us so much, if not we would have gotten everything burnt. The fire was just too strong to control. But then, that's what real chefs use.

Thursday 9 June 2005

Regretting like nuts.. why didn't i accept NUS? If anything goes wrong with ucsd, I'm screwed..

Looked through the pre-departure prog, the 2nd day sounds real fun, dining etiquettes and cooking, haha, they know that we can't cook and eat properly..

Oh yeah, I uploaded photos.. photos of that concert in my house.. check it out here. If you have more photos of that day, please send to me. Thanks.

Some photos:
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3f-ers! AS, VAS and um, HK.

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That figure in red coming down the slide is me.. ice palace

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Icy polar bear

Sunday 5 June 2005

Think my blog entries are getting more brainless all the time.. Like I've stopped thinking..

Went tree top walk finally, with my mom. She was more excited than I was.. The bridge is pretty, that's all. Not exciting cos it bearly shakes when people walk through, it doesn't feel high, and there isn't a rushing river below the bridge. It takes me only half an hour to get home from McRitchie bustop by bus, but the bus takes 20min to come..

went Yamaha yesterday afternoon.. Late, at 4.45. Gave them a shock with my hair. Hee. Everybody has his/her problems. No one is truly carefree, isn't it? Renee must have given it a lot of thought before coming to the decision. A lot, with her interest, passion in music. Even though my first reaction was also 'no way', if she has made up her mind, i would respect it, but who am I right? :) Why do class sizes get smaller all the time? Uninterested pple quit, people who are truly passionate quit due to circumstances, bad timing, busy school life, picking up something else, putting passion into something else, or in my case, sigh, 2 main reasons:
1) don't see where I'm going
2) I don't want to have too great a time when I'm still in Singapore, cos then I'll feel terrible when i leave everything, everyone, every moment behind
I don't seem to be able to talk to mr tan face to face. Our negotiations, offers, everything are all through sms. Feel like going over on wed to settle everything but think that i won't settle anything anyway. He's tempting me back to lessons again.. no no no, I cannot go back to lessons..

Hmm, I was talking about Rain, how did end up talking about myself? selfish me
Anyway, Yamaha was empty yesterday, so we had the studio to ourselves after 5. Cool, Shane was playing piano, Pris played a CD and Shane accompanied the CD. darn pro!

I have this lousy ability to copy. I can't mimick something unless u tell me how exactly I'm supposed to do it. Realised it during j1 orientation dance, was so slow in getting dance steps. and I never ever figured out how mr tan did his accompaniments on piano, darn pro too. Those are the times which I really wish i can play piano..

Saturday 4 June 2005

Went to the visit Ice Sculptures thing at Bugis.. freezing cold, literally. -10degrees. But pretty spectacular, transparent crystal like structures.. cool n cold. For some reason, the ice doesn't melt much, I touched it and my finger came off dry. Maybe they added stuff to the ice.

Played on the slides, um, quite bumpy. haha. Tried the snow slide with the float thing.. Whee!! But.. I fell, and the ice crystals (snow) got into my shoes, got my socks all wet, freezing my toes. I tried to stand up by pushing the floor, as how u'll usually push urself up, but the floor was filled with snow, so I froze my hand. Pins and needles. ouch. That's when I decided I need to go thaw a while, went out to the aircon room. They were so smart to sell hot drinks. Anyway, my specs misted up, real bad, it turned totally white, the colour of snow. My hands slowly gained back feeling, and felt real hot.. Is that what frostbite feels like? cold, numb, then hot? vessels can't decide how much to constrict and dilate.. anyway, if you're going there and playing slides, either make sure u hide ur hands in ur sleeves or get gloves. Don't touch the snow.

I'm going to start a Back-To-School operation. I think it's quite scary to go to a foreign university with a totally different system when I still have to struggle with school work. I don't think I can do a proper integration now. Or recall the Newton-Raphson formula, or know how to make an amine from a chloroalkane, or anything about capacitors.. hmm, all J2 stuff, now what did I learn in J1? anyway, I should read Campbell too, as sunny suggested, shouldn't waste my $60..

Actually this operation sounds darn scary too..

Thursday 2 June 2005

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A 2-litres fermentor. Wanted to upload this long time ago. Yup, it's exactly like the diagram in Soper except that all the probes and openings are from the top instead of any-old-how poked in from the sides. A whole mess of tubes sticking out of it.. And the huge green machine next to it controls the temp/ pH/ stirrer rate and so on..

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Different concentrations of metal ions solutions. I think they are beautiful. One of the reasons why I like the NUS chem eng lab is because I get to look at these beautiful colours. Yes i'm easily awed.
Have been abandoning this place for a while..

Wed: went to Biopolis to take a psycho test, but realised that i have already taken it, so went to disturb Sylvia instead. Growth monitoring, how interesting. Of course monitoring with lots of disturbances from lloyd. Had lunch at holland v with sylvia and dave. Heard about how stress it is to be on a trip with the boss.. scary. I'd better hope that I get a less 'demanding' boss.. After lunch, decided that I haven't done anything productive in the day (but well, I don't do much productive things on most days), so I decided to go RJ, since it's quite convenient to get there from Holland v. Waited forever for the bus to come.. Went RJ, collected cert and yearbook.
About the yearbook, it looks better than last year's, they used more photos than last year's. Last year's yearbook was just a collection of photos from Outlooks. There's a huge pic of Nicholas, so huge..

Thurs: was supposed to have driving lesson, but I cancelled it because of the would-be tea session, then they cancelled the tea session. Make up ur mind people. Anyway I went for health checkup.. Think the assistants are really nice and friendly. They can actually match the face to the name, as in, i was just walking around, and the assistant saw me and asked me to go to counter 5. Amazing. Hey, I didn't gain that much weight from the last time i took my weight in school. haha, thought I would weigh a tonne now after bumming so much and gorging so much.