gripes

Picture by Brooks Elliott on flickr

Recess week is ending. How fast. Especially when there wasn’t much in the way or resting done.

Picked up a partner for a programming assignment which could be done either alone or in pairs. Big mistake.

Thanks to that assignment, I am left with Sunday to work on 2 other assignments due next week, prepare for tutorials, study for a test on Monday, for a module which I have not been following because, let’s just say I’m not too impressed with the lecturer.

And how about stuff outside of school work.

And what about unwinding? A lot of stress has built up. The pressure just keeps piling on. But what choice is there?

It’s expected that Jim just takes whatever shite thrown at him silently and produce what people want. Jim has to be always there, always available.

hello there

The Monday after a long weekend is the worst. Loads of work waiting to be done.

And why am I writing such a pointless entry? It seems that the recent entries aren’t exactly gay stuff.. Well gay in the old traditional meaning of gay.

For some hidden reason I’ve made a page briefly introducing some past school programming projects., found here.

Applying for internship at two different firms. Hoping something good happens. Like something really good.

doomsday

Picture by (Alex) on flickr

Struggling to function after only 2+ hours’ sleep. Received the SMS for the exam results but was not woken up by it. Rather, it was another text from a friend minutes after that woke me up and got me to start the day way earlier.

In case the fictitious reader is interested to know:

OS: A-
SE: B+
Algo: B
Math: C

This is my first ever C grade and I don’t think I’ll ever feel happy again about getting a C. But since it’s math..

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On a side note since I chose to show a scoreboard as the picture for the post, I thought I’d mention that this stinkhole of a country won the women’s title for table tennis. Produced in China, Packed in Stinkapore.

19 hours.

Picture by dotpolka on flickr

The near certain fate of my calculus module this sem.

19 hours to go.

21 hours to go.

surprise

Picture by Laughing Squid on flickr

One of my core values have always been pessimism. I believe that the best thing about being pessimistic is that you’re always either proven right or pleasantly surprised. This also means I am very risk-adverse as well. And all the other qualities that the world discourages.

But for the first time in a while, a deep conviction on the negative got overturned and a pleasant surprise came. Subsync was awarded runners-up by Microsoft for the Best Project Price Prize. Somehow it seems amusing because if I remember correctly, the download count on our GCPH page didn’t increase since the time of submission.

I could go on about why we shouldn’t have gotten anything, but I suspect someone from the module has stumbled across this blog. Someone googled “subsync gcph” and ridiculously a check of my own reveals that the only result leads to this blog.

In case you’re wondering, this is Jim.

routine

Picture by papalars on flickr

Haven’t been writing for a while. Guess I wasn’t missed though.

My morning routine has always been much the same.

1. Turn off the alarm (which is a cute and loud mp3 from my phone, and it requires solving 2 math problems to make sure I am indeed awake).
2. Going back to sleep. Getting a gulp of water from the bottle by my bed. It’s pure condensed dew from the morning coolness.
3. Tidy the sheets, go to the bathroom and wash up and shave.
4. Get coffee and/or breakfast

And if I wasn’t rushing to school it’ll be turning on the comp, and the first use of each day also follows a certain routine

1. Winamp
2. MSN
3. Firefox

For Firefox itself there is a routine

1. BBC News RSS feed
2. Soccernet RSS feed
3. Gmail
4. Hotmail
5. Blogs of friends
6. Some blogs of my interests
7. And some uhm.. download sites.
8. My favourite web comics (xkcd if it’s a release day) and C&H
9. IVLE
10. And if I need to read some lousy subjective news I go to CNA as well.

After this the routine ends.

Recently I discovered there’s a new set

1. Update project working copy
2. Read commit logs for changes
3. Check GCPH page for issues and other things
4. Pray there isn’t some disaster that happened overnight

But well, it’s ending. 1 more week to go. Just another pointless advertisement. We can be found at http://subsync.info

And by the end of this coming Thursday 15 Apr 2010 version 2 will be released.

Until then, it’s coding, bug testing and hair pulling.

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Oh I realise sometimes when I’m in a particularly anti-gahmen mood I’d go to certain blogs and sites to check up on the latest news.

But how about looking at things from a slightly different point of view.

We should lurve the gahmen for loving us and wanting to keep us around, by binding us with 30-year mortgages for housing. Also it is in the view of our health and well being (constant activity!) we have to work past retirement age all the way until we die (from overwork). And the disgusting COE prices? It’s to reduce traffic to do our bit for the environment! The rich who drive… well their souls are so tainted in their process of getting rich so it doesn’t matter! We also get to get used to getting crammed in public transport, so that we can get used to getting crammed into shelters come the 2012 disasters!

And also getting used to the squeeze when we eventually go to Hell, where it’s flooded with lawyers and bankers and gahmen ministers.

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Unrelated footnote

I was looking for a nice picture to put for this post. What I had in mind was a cup of coffee and a computer. After browsing through 20 pages of the search results on flickr, the only suitable ones were those with a Mac -_-”

And no, I don’t like them.

subsync

Perhaps I’ll do some advertisement for my software engineering project which is open to the public.

Home of Subsync

Subsync is a sync tool based on Subversion (SVN) to do syncing and versioning. It is written to run on Windows and Linux.

And it was also the cause of a week of hell, of coffee intoxication and of sleep deprivation.

Because of the lack of time, the extra stuff needed to run were not included.

You will need to have GTKsharp and MS .Net Framework 3.5 installed.

There are of course numerous bugs, the most glaring of which is the console window opening along with the GUI. The manual as I understand it is pretty crappy as well.

But if you are looking for a tool to sync work files between computers (or even just local folders), as well as a great versioning with incremental backups that won’t eat away at your hard disk compared to pure copies of the old versions, this might be useful.

loads of java

Programming in C# actually.

Remember: Programmers turn coffee into code

The green tea bottle is there just for some comparison. It’s about the standard shape of a 1.5l bottle.

I have never made so much coffee before, and finish it in a night.

Didn’t help much though. Lasted til 6+ in the morning before crashing out. Woke up at 8.30 only to crash again after struggling to produce a few lines of code.

Life’s crappy good.

雨がやんでしまったら　どこへ帰ればいい？

koohii

Maybe slightly more than a keg..

Now on 4 cups. I get the feeling I’ll break last sem’s peak of 5 soon.

Very soon.

v is not for victor

Picture by david spigolon on flickr

Neither peace nor victory, but the number of questions out of 10 I got right for the math midterm.