Vending machines that only accept coins

Right now, I’m just glad that when I stopped at cold storage today to buy some milk and bread, I didn’t have to try my best to collect as much loose change as I could. I think I should be grateful for this, as well as so many other things.

Diagonalizable matrices

Just the other day, I was looking through the stickes on my dashboard and discovered a link pertaining to my Math EE research. Some article discussing diagonalizable matrices. It’s nice having bits and pieces not only on my computer but around the house reminding me of the experience that IB was. The late nights spent working on my EE, drafts of my world lit that I scribbled all over. One of these days I shall have to pack all my IB things into boxes though. I wonder what all this will mean?

I DID NOT GRADUATE FROM THIS SCHOOL.

I was intending to write a longer post but I really had to make this announcement.

The students and teachers of the Anglo Chinese School (Independent)’s ambitious attempt to break the Guinness World Record for the most number of people performing the Bollywood Dance ...

I DID NOT GRADUATE FROM THIS SCHOOL. heh.

I like eating cutted fruit.

It’s been quite a while since I enlisted and I’ve since moved on from being a recruit on the island known to us as Pulau Tekong. I’ve only been here for a week and so far it seems a much nicer place. They give you more freedom. In spite of this however, we are all still essentially trainees and there are many things we’re not allowed to do. Of these restrictions, one of them is not being allowed to eat the cut fruit. Let me explain further.

In our new cookhouse we are no longer given fruits by the aunties or uncles behind the counter. Instead, we collect our fruits from this fridge in the cookhouse. I like this new system because it means we get chilled fruits! It also means we don’t have to collect the fruit and waste food if we run out of time to eat it. Most of the time the fridge is stocked with pears, oranges and plates of cut fruit. It’s too much of a bother to eat oranges without a knife (and enough time). We’re not allowed to touch the plates of cut fruit neatly wrapped in foil wrap either. There’s a label on the fridge stating the “cutted” fruit is only for warrant officers. This usually means I end up eating the pears. Everyday I walk past the fridge and take a pear. 6 days of eating pear however can have adverse effects.

I noticed it most clearly when I booked out this weekend. Being out of camp, I was able to turn up for this lunch buffet with my family. As I walked past the fruit table, I felt this sudden compulsion to eat fruits and ended up collecting a plate of cut papayas and oranges. It was fun, almost exciting, getting to eat what the warrant officers get to eat everyday. Odd, what army does to you.

Cheers everyone. Here’s to hoping all of us get to eat cut fruits next weekend.

What does the army do to you?

In the army, many say you become stupid, lose your identity and stop thinking. The other night, when yet another of my friends was telling me this, I wondered whether I was ever anything but stupid, whether I ever knew who I really am and whether I ever thought very much about anything at all. Did the army change anything at all?

Then I figured all these concepts are so iffy and vague that it hardly matters. What matters is we try our best and work towards becoming smarter, thinking better and everything. What does army change? Nothing. 

Good luck for field camp and SIT test and everything everybody.

First bookout!

As I was leaving the island on the 1600 fastcraft, I had so many thoughts on my mind, so many things i wanted to say. Much of it probably cannot be said on this blog either for personal reasons or because I might be charged in court.

What I can say though, is that I am still alive in the army and that it hasn’t been quite as bad as what I expected. The people are nice, the place itself looks a bit like a resort (from afar – you know nice sandy beaches and everything) and the food is okay-ish. 

Well now I think the worst part about army is having to book in. It never is really that bad once you’re in there, just the process of booking in.

So anyway, good luck everybody. Take care.

BYE!

Soon, I will no longer be an IB student who has finished IB and is enjoying his holidays. What will happen from here? I wonder.

All the best everyone!

6th of January.

Who cares about angular momentum. I insist the world will stop spinning tomorrow.

All the best everyone.

THE END OF IT ALL.

2008 is fast coming to an end. Thus it is only right that I write a blog post regarding how the year has been and what the year ahead should be. Well, last year I wrote something about how this blog isn’t really dead – Not something that should be written on the last day of the year but let’s ignore that. This year though, I have a much better excuse for not reflecting on the year past and thinking about the year ahead.

There is this HUGE event on the 6th of January. I can’t see anything beyond this event. If I were to think about anything after the 6th of January, it wouldn’t make any sense to me. All I can think about is what happens on the 6th. Nothing happening before that is of any importance. My sole aim now is to wait and see what happens on the 6th, burn whatever time I have trying not to think about the 6th such that it would arrive sooner.

Additionally, I think at least once in my lifetime, I would want to sit somewhere and watch the sunrise as a new year arrives. Oh there’s so much you can think about on the 31st of December. None of that matters though, because of what happens on the 6th.

The long overdue acceptance of the end of this chapter.

This year marks a significant milestone in my life. I have finally departed from the ACS family of schools, finished off the last year of organised education and freed myself from IB. It is quite clearly the end of this chapter.

Over the last few weeks, I have been assaulted by a flurry of thoughts, feelings and emotions that descended upon me as I fully absorbed the fact that here it is – the end of this chapter and it won’t wait for me to procrastinate any longer. I felt overwhelmed. Of the feelings that lingered, one was the feeling that soon this experience – IB, school, friends and everything – would fade from my memory. Over the years, I would slowly but surely forget the pains of staying up late, the joys of finishing an assignment and the pleasure found in the good company. All of this would feel so distant. I was gripped by the fear that it would all be gone. It pushed me to write something down, to at least capture a fragment of this moment within these unwieldy words of mine, jumbled together to form sentences, paragraphs and this blog entry. Subsequently, I wondered if it would be considered cliched, to write a post to document this already well-documented ending. I finally decided I would write it, partly because of a related realisation on my part that one doesn’t always have to do something new, creative and unexpected to learn from the experience and to grow from it. Just as it is important that each individual learns how to prove basic mathematical formulae discovered centuries ago, writing this blog post would play an important role in my path to deciphering all that I felt over the past few weeks.

To begin, I thought I would mention how I would definitely feel sad leaving so much behind. I will no longer see all my previous teachers along the corridor, no longer eat the food from the SAC, no longer walk along the corridors of this school and it is all immensely saddening. More importantly however, I realised that this means that I will no longer be able to add onto that list of “Things I did in Secondary School”. This is particularly depressing for me. Over much of the past 18 years of my life, I have carried along with me this relentless and perhaps blind optimism that keeps me going at times when everything feels hopeless. I seem to have this uncanny ability to think that everything would turn out fine even if nothing seems to suggest it. I hope when there should be no hope. Basically this means that I dream a lot and I have had dreams of doing quite a number of unrealistic things over the span of my life in school. The end of this chapter has forced me to accept that perhaps many of these dreams would never come true. I distinctly remember dreaming about getting spectacular grades for an English Essay or winning a Medal in prestigious competition. I would have to accept that none of this would ever happen again. Worst still, I would never even be learning English formally again. It is something I will have to learn to accept, over the days and weeks that pass by. However, I hope it is something that I will never forget because I hope I don’t feel the same way when the final chapter of my life comes to an end.

It is probably apt at this point to disregarding these regrets that fill me with sadness and to move on to some brighter aspects of my school life. I have realised that the best thing this school has brought me is the people. I have a wonderful bunch of friends. I cannot begin to describe how much I owe these people. The only regret I have is that I never appreciated them as much as I should have or thanked them enough for putting up with me. They have at every turn been obliging and willing to help. They are also people who have in many aspects been consistently brilliant, something I never realised till much later. I sincerely hope I never lose these friends. 

Time and again I have lamented how if we were to be home-schooled we might have finished the syllabus much faster. This however, was never the point of going to school. In addition to the many friends I have made, the people I have met in school have taught me to better appreciate the different talents in different people. At some point over these 12 years, I began to realise how there was so much to appreciate in each and every unique person. I believe I have grown to be more able to empathise with people and relate to people, to place myself in another person’s shoes to feel what he feels, see what he sees and hear what he hears. It is not something that I am terribly good at, but it is something that I feel the people here have taught me and shown me and something I am thankful to have learnt though I dare not say I have mastered.

All in all, these 12 years they have been eventful and I hope the next few will be even more eventful. I am thankful for all that has not gone wrong and all that I have learnt. I wish everyone the best and I suppose this brings to an end a truly long overdue blogpost which will hopefully bring a close this chapter of my life.