Operation Friendship

To be absolutely frank, waking up on Friday in time for 9am lesson is no joke.
Of course, my friends here have lessons as early as 8am everyday and even K has 9am language classes daily, except Friday.

But I knew today was going to be an interesting day. I grabbed my sliced apples that I bought in some pack and off I went to campus for my first formal lecture on Time Series. They invited some guy from the NZ stats department to give us a lecture on it and he gave out the first assignment at the end of it. For the first time, the first assignment wasn't set on a lot of Mathematics, but more of like a descriptive essay which he said "not more than 15 pages". In my mind, "how can anyone write so much and so longggggggg?" Somehow, I'm going to have it completed. Somehow.

During my 2 hr breakfrom 10-12, I was feeling kinda curious and wanted to know what the Mt Hutt booth was offering outside the UCSA building so I headed there and had a look at it. Since it was only offering season passes, I decided to give it a miss and headed to the UCSA building.

Happened to meet Tom and WS there having their turn at the PS3 on the car racing game. I think they had this promo that whoever could complete the fastest lap time would win a PSP. Then Nicole came over and tapped on my shoulders. Too bad she didn't play else I'm sure I would have taken more shots. HA! ;)

Promised to meet up with WS for lunch at the corner Fish & Chips shop which cost only 3NZD but apparently, I was only informed of the 1-3pm lab session during the lecture at 12. So, no choice had to turn it down as I need to really familiarise myself with the PROLOG else even getting an S in S/U would be difficult. Even more so without my JAVA knowledge. Sheesh.

And thankfully I went for the lab. Cos' I was really struggling thru the 2 hours but all thanx to some of my coursemates and tutors, I somehow managed to understand alot on how the Liunx system works. Bet the tutor must be thinking how I actually got into this course. SHEESH. But at least I really learnt ALOT FROM THE FIRST LAB.

Headed back to Central library to catch up on the papers and mails, etc. and clear some admin stuff regarding my confirmation of courses [yes, I have not confirmed all yet....] so been walking back and forth from registrar office to engin office then to international office and back to enrollment office, etc.

5.30pm we meet up with the Kiwis and went to their homes for dinner! Yes! A KIWI BBQ Buffet dinner! And the house I went to was just plainly.... AWESOME! It is just like my dream house man. I just "WOW-ed" like some kiddo in Willy Wonka's factory man from the foot to the summit of the hill where the house was. The view was fantastic and the house was just.... SUPER NICE MAN!


Look at the kitchen man! Even has a dishwasher! And their garage has a pool table and even Sky TV! The sheep dog they have is darn cute man! And the cat... well... it's just lazy. =)

And for the first time, I got to try out the Hocky Pockey which was NZ ice cream with some toffee bits and even their kiwi's sorta dessert. i donno how u call it but it's just fluffy sorta taste. DARN NICE LAR! Then had hot coffee to end it up while we chatted into the night and played some games and got to know more about each other. They even sent us back at the end of it!

Sorta have this adrenaline rush to actually type it here now! WOOHOO! K decided to go for some beach party today so she headed out for the evening till 1230am to return from the city back here just to change shoes! Talking about havoc-ing thru the night! HA! Ah, but I guess I need my needed sleep now so...

maybe some other time!

2 modules to comment: EE3001 and Artificial Intelligence (AI)

A look at the course materials:

There is this engeering course which I managed to map back to EE3001 from the College of Science --- "Science and Entrepreneurship in New Zealand".

Yes, the textbook is replaced with lots and lots of DVDs and magazines. They have a 30% grp work and the rest, well... some assignments and class participation. Only 13 of us in the course and receiving this "Welcome Pack" involves having the lecturer calling for our names and each of us had to go to the front of the small LT (it's still an LT mind u) and give a little self-intro before having this hand over ceremony from the lecturer. And for once, I dont feel so old in this course, cos there are other post-grad and mature students attending this course with 1 of them being an ex-lecturer from the Electrical and Electronics Engineering department, but now studying Physics.

Anyway, on my way back, I happened to find the UCSA doing farnie things again. Now they have a reverse bungee jump on campus.


Having a 'taste' of the difficulty of the different courses, I'm quite happy with most of them except for "AI and algorithm" as they are doing a bit of code in JAVA which they assumed I know cos' over here, their equivalent of "data structures and algo" is done in JAVA not C++.

But then again, even if it's C++. I'm sure it would be as bad. So, contemplating of dropping it till I talked to the lecturer and he agreed to help me out with the Java part since this course isn't about Java. :)

Sheesh man. Think gotta work alot harder here since I do travel on weekends and gotta plan the itinery during weekdays as well as the fact that I must clear my homework/assignments/programming work/watching the DVDs above in prep for class participation for next lessons, etc. And that is not considering that I sleep late. Now, even my flatmate knows my sleeping pattern... SHEESH.

And lectures begin.

On a lighter note (and thus a separate entry), lectures have started this week and I'm still in the process of sorting out the different modules (they call it courses here). Dropped a stats module on Sampling Methods and took another advanced control module from their mechanical engineering department. After getting approval from the 4th Year Mech Eng coordinator, I went to get the course reader and met Eva working there. I immediately opened the package to read the contents of it and decided that it wasn't for me when I realised matrices scribbled all over the course reader with many unidentified symbols. Thus, I dropped the module immediately and that was 30 min after meeting the professor in Engineering.

Instead, I went on to select another course in AI and algorithm (some level 3 comp sci course) and went to seek approval from the Comp Sci coordinator the next day. Unfortunately the network was down and he could only approve the module this afternoon. As believed, the admin work here is like sooo.... SLOW. Thus, to speed up the entire process I had to literally walk from building to building, being referred from people to person till you eventually see the suitable one. SHEESH. So, I'm now assuming that my AI course has been approved and would be attending the course tomorrow.

Nicole sent me an sms on Clubs' Day and reminded me to sign up for it. As a very late sleeper, I forced myself to wake up slightly earlier than usual (around 11am, but my lecture starts at 1 PLUS OKAY!) to search for UCSSS on campus. Just when I sms-ed Nicole that I'm sorta "can't find" the booth, I heard some screams of "Andy, Andy!" behind me and realised that it was the girls at the booths who were calling out for me. So, I signed up for the club and got a club T.



For the uninitiated, the UCSSS peeps gave me the English name Andy. Ah wells. Donno if it beats Pierre. Josh still asked why my surname isn't Lau. (-,-)

Rushed back to lectures there after at 1.10pm. Over here, lessons before 1pm start on the hour and ends 10 min earlier while lessons after 1pm starts 10 min past the hour and ends on the hour. Not bad I would say, considering that I have a 11-4pm non-stop lesson next week. This would certainly allow me to grab some sandwich to go.

Did I mention that for the whole of O-week as well as the first week of lessons, the campus is having this sausage sizzle by the lawn? This meant free lunch for the whole of this week, but due to my weird sleeping habits, I don't think this is enticing enough to get me waking up early. If I'm ever up, it's because I have some lesson to attend to.

Maori welcome dance organised by UCSA.

Some pictures taken from the 11th floor of Central Library from the different rooms.




Carnival @ Ilam Village on Sunday!

Looking cool eh dudette Katie!


Observe the outdoor grill? YESH! Free burgers and sausage + sandwich for all!
Basically, I realised they enjoy having free kiwi BBQ all the time. But it's quite nice considering that it is such a nice weather and the sun sets almost at 8pm daily. It's getting later by the day. Maybe that's why we are returning to the without daylight saving hours after the third Sunday of March.

After all the different food I have tried, I guess I'm still better off with
from Hungry Wok @ The Crossings. Such a tiny plate cost me 8NZD okay! As I say, an average meal cost abt 8NZD so this is considered average pricing!

And knowing that each meal is so ex, I decided to cook my own Chinese food. My first few attempts at Sweet and Sour Fish.

And my attempts at cooking vegetables with the 3 universal Chinese sauces which I purchased for almost 8NZD for each bottle: Oyster sauce, light Soya Sauce and seasame oil.

Observe that I managed to cook rice without the rice cooker. I got my refund from The Warehouse for the rice cooker I bought after my first attempt at cooking rice worked.
Found a Chinese shop selling Unagi @ 9NZD. Not bad considering that everything here is so expensive. And for once, something tasted quite the same as what I had back in Singapore.


This is my kitchenette and my living room. Observe the LCD screen TV. =) My place is actually more spruced up now cos' Kat bought additional pots of plants and some cushions to the place for 'colour' as she says.



And the place where I hang out with the 'Village' peeps.


The city landmark --- Christchurch Cathedral.


The Flea market at the city. It's there daily till about 5pm. In fact, every major shops in the city closes at 6pm. It's worse during Sunday and Saturday. By 5pm, the city would almost look like some ghost town in Resident Evil.


The toilet building (also in the city). It is about 3 stories high with showers within. Free, of course.


The gagantuan chess set which they only release for public use during the weekdays till 5pm.


And lastly, the historic tram that travels around all places of interest within the city from the Art Museum to Avon River (it's everywhere anyway). Recently the free Shuttle that is a free bus system that travels also to the visitor's attractions within the city seem to be a more popular choice.


Oh and yesh, how can I forget. Here's 1 last pic which I managed to resize to VGA. It's a picture taken across the Ilam Fields somewhere opposite the University. The backgrd is the Uni campus.


Gosh. I donno how much bandwidth I have used to upload these pictures. Sheesh.

Alrights I gotta end here now. Must do homework. See? Such a good boy. =)

My friendster account is hackd.

Just realised that my Friendster account has been hacked into. Damn. I forgot to sign out from the internet cafe 2 weeks ago and an idiot went to change my profile. Curses. So if u see a ZG logging into his friendster account since 12th Feb, chances are, it's not me. So just to clarify, any rubbishy mails must be sent by the farker who used my friendster account.

Been a while since I have been into friendster. Maybe it's a sign for me to change to facebook.

Karma to the b**ch. ccb.

concluding episode of Prison Break 3

It felt like yesterday that I caught the first episode of prison break 3. And today is the day I caught the last episode of the season.

Very timely if you ask me, cos' lessons starting next week.

So many burning questions, so many twists and turns in the story.
What is the company? The pad-man? More importantly, why is it that The Company wants to hunt the brothers down?

Don't we all miss Sarah in the third episode?

Too bad for the writer's strike or we might have known more. Feeling so hyped up now. Comparing with the first 2 seasons, this 3rd one might seem to be a lot more violent with lots of twist and turns within.

Can't wait for the 4th season.

How I'm coping with my food

Going online is like a luxury now man. Imagine 5 GB of data/mth! How can anyone live with that?!
Even typing this very entry has to be on wordpad/notepad first before actually cutting and pasting on blogger.com
So don't ever complain "why no pic" or something of that sort. My computer applications whenever I'm on the net would be Skype and MSN and these 2 are like darn sinful already. Therefore, when no one interesting is on either, I would simply disconnect and hit the intranet for some movies/games/music. Even the internet cafe is like 3NZD/ hr which is so much more reliable since it is time-based. And I can simply open up all the applications in the world.

By the way, there is a separate charge for the use of internet within the university. So you get the idea.

ROAR!

Anyway, I found a place with reasonably good chinese food. Pay about 8 NZD for a small plate and 10 NZD for a larrge plate and you can stuff all the food you can on that plate! It's just above the city Bus Exchange! WOOHOO! And I saw bubble tea too! But no prizes for guessing how much it cost. (Hint: it's almost the same cost as 1 litre of milk). The Chinese food on campus is just.... plain lousy. I threw the entire garbage away after eating abt 1/2 a packet of supposed sweet and sour chicken which tasted nothing close to that but has a feel of eating an over-done steak coated in some artificial red-coloured sauce . Think I need some caveman kinda teeth to chew this sort of nonsense.

And now you can almost guess what I missed in Singapore. It's a hassle to actually think of what I'm going to have for my next meal and each meal is like some surprise. Sometimes good sometimes it just sucks. It's okay when I purchase microwavable spaghetti from the nearest supermarket, but seriously, spaghetti for each meal? You gotta be kidding me.

I want my 鱼片米粉!

SIN-CHC

Flight on board was pretty good. Perhaps it was due to the fact that it was the month of the Lunar New Year that everyone had a set of mini yusheng for their dinner on the plane. There weren't many nice movies this month to my taste, so I just watched a few movies such as "Home Song Stories", a few documentries and the nostalgic Mario game which I used to play when I was in primary 1. Caught all these movies while being half asleep and half awake.

It didn't really matter much when the 10 hour long flight was reduced to slightly over 9 hours as my biological would have told me that it was time to sleep just as it was almost 2am in Singapore. Apparently, I had only 3 hours of sleep due to this time difference, less than 3 hours in fact, considering that I was weaving in and outta sleep most of the time.

The weather was all clear and a little sunny when the plane touchdowned at Christchurch airport. From the window, I could see how sparsely populated Chirstchurch was . At the immigration, almost everyone was an international visitor to this country, resulting in a super long queue at "All Passports" immigration. Of course the disabled and those with families with small children got the express lane to clear immigration, while I waited patiently in the queue. It was pretty weird to see Duty-free shops open when an aircraft docks at the airport and close right after its passengers clears immigration.

As I checked into my accomodation, I just wanted to sleep right through the rest of the day. It was almost noon right here in Christchurch. So, I plonked myself to tumberland as soon as I laid out my bedsheets and got my duvet. Before long, it was almost 4pm and as soon as I realised this, I rushed out of the apartment and walked myself to the nearest Supermarket near Riccarton Road to purchase food and all my necessities. I think I am missing Singapore food already having eaten 2 days of spaghetti, noodles, bread, etc. Oh and just a rough guide of how much the food here would cost: 1 litre of milk ~ 4 NZD , 1 pack of Yakult ~ 5 NZD, 2.50 NZD for a loaf of bread, a meal here ~ 8-10 NZD. You get the idea now, don't you?

Unlike NUS, the internet on campus here requires payment. It's those kind where u pay for a fixed plan (volume based) and surf at 100MB/s. Any data exceeding this volume would render the internet connection to slow down to a dial-up connection of 64kb/s. So streaming 1 episode of prison break would just set me back by like darn alot of space already...

But I guess I wouldn't need to stream prison break anymore considering that they are also showing Prison Break on TV, just that it lags by about almost 10 episodes from what I'm watching. (-,-) Nonetheless, for the very first time, I got to watch South Park on TV! WOOHOO! And the nightly TV programs from 7-10pm are somewhat more interesting than what I have back at home! =) of course, there are also sordid types!

And yes, the weather has been quite kind so far. It's quite okay in the day when I actually start to move my muscles and walk for long distances. Yes, walking for a long time does not make one sweat! In fact, it helps to generate heat to counter this cold. And gosh, it's not even winter and the temperature is like as low as 10 degrees at night. *shudders* argh. Apparently there are people who still wear sandals and shorts in such a weather and even open their windows to allow more cold air to enter their room. And yes, thank goodness there is such a thing as heaters in the apartments here else it sure feels like living in Snow City whole day long.

It's funny that I didn't see any cows or farm animals as yet, except those that are in the frozen food section in the supermarket.

Shall wake up early tomorrow and head down to the city. =) Just realised how much I missed being a city boy.

Heh.

Before long, I'm off to a new land

This week has been very fast.

Monday and Tuesday just whizzed by.
Wednesday - Had Reunion Dinner at grandma's place
Thursday - Hanged around with paternal relatives
Friday - Hung ard with maternal relatives and shopped at Tampines Giant hypermarket and did online check in thereafter.
Sat - Time devoted to catching up with friends over my CCA/Chinese teacher's place then some shopping of IT gadgets
Sun - Woke up late to do some last min packing and sitting in the house computer typing my last entry before I actually fly over.

Lots of thoughts came to my mind last night as I was chatting with great friends over the net.

Had a hell lot of time these few days.
Now it's time for me to push my boundaries further in 4 hrs time.

Dont know what else to say. Heh.

Thanks to those who have made the past few weeks fun and all for me. =)

New Year Eve

Went out on New Year Eve to Sim Lim OG area. Then for the very first time in my life, I actually walked around Bugis Street! WOW! It sure was crowded, but there were many fashionable clothes!

Bought a vest from Messy at Bugis Junction and purchased a belt from FreshBox.

Then headed to Paya Lebar station and walked to Grandma's place.
Was a bit attracted to the Bossini sale on the way there and took another tour in there and out I came with another vest.

I can almost hear the *ka ching* cash register sound in my head each time I shop.

Oh, I've been admiring my hair.=)

Stuck in Lift

To continue the story, after I left NUS I went down to Shaw Centre to redeem my Singtel Abundance Set only to realise that there was a long queue outside that stretched for more than 5 shops away. Nonetheless, armed with almost 6 cans of heavy can food behind my back and 2 glass bottles, I headed straight for Cine thereafter for a quick haircut.

Luckily SuperCuts produced quite wonderful results and I was very happy with my hair! HEH! At last, a hairstylist agreed with me that keeping short hair is easier!

Then the finale came when I went to John Little at orchard and was trapped in the lift for 35 minutes as the lift door didn't open. So while waiting in there, I took out my camera and took a video clip every 15 min. As the intercom didn't work in the lift, I whipped out my handphone and call the shopping centre's customer service to inform them of the state i'm in. Apparently they weren't even concious of taking down my hp number to call me back or what as they check the progress. The emergency bell will only ring when my finger is on it. So, after pressing the buzzer for more than 5 min, I allowed my finger to rest and started to ring the bell in some rhythemic pattern. :)

But I got bored after 15 min. Donno if I should upload the clip but wells, they have got my contacts and email to send me some explanation. Don't misunderstand: I'm not annoyed with John Little, but more of the dumb lift that failed to open the door.

Ah wells, reached Hougang Mall at 8pm to join my family for dinner at the Japanese Restaurant there. Couldn't purchase what I wanted at Hougang Mall. The Post Office closed already.

Good Morning World!

Good morning World!

Yeaps I was outta my house and was at J8's Mcdonalds by 9am. Fast eh? Then I realised I should have brought my laptop with me for wireless@sg.
Took a train down to Bouna Vista after visiting Mdm Chia in Cat High.
Train was not crowded during the peak hours but it was rather packed when intervals of 9 min is in place during the non-peak.

So where am I now?

In NUS using the computers. =) HEH. And time now is 1.33pm (according to the windows clock on this terminal I'm using).

Okay, gotta chow soon.

Still gotta head to Orchard and maybe Funan + Hougang Mall later.

Holidays at the Apple Store (Singapore)

Contacted the Singapore Apple Store the first thing today. As I laid on my bed, i reached for the phone to phone Apple regarding the love of my life. Needed to know which is the earliest date they would send her over to me. Apparently, they could only send it over next Monday since they, too, are enjoying the festive season this coming Wed-Fri.

Ah wells, looks like I can only enjoy the touch when I return from my exchange.

Hopefully the price drops by then and the jailbreak software is out for that version which I'm buying.

iPod Touch

Retail therapy sure does work.
Went with Mum today to Funan to shop for IT gadgets. Feels darn shiok to purchase so many things, though they aren't for me.


Currently the 8GB iPod Touch cost $498.
Can't wait.

Gotta lay my hands on her while she's hawt.

Think I'm in love.
And yes, this is my engraved one.
She's mine. :)