I haven't been blogging for quite some time. Very, very busy. :(
Anyway, an update about things that happened. Raffles Hall's Mid-Autumn Festival Celebrations coincided neatly with my project submissions and mid-terms. It was suddenly pushed forward two whole weeks, and I have two different performances, and three songs to practice for. Had to compensate two weeks of practices for that, and it was certainly no joke. Working with people always takes in a lot of extra time and effort, especially when standards and expectations are high. But if it's a job well done, it has its rewards.
I performed one song for The Rugged Hallways (aka the hall band), and Chamber Music Ensemble. Yanlei is nice to work with, and though her violin skills are not perfect, it's inspiring and heart warming to see the effort she puts into her practices and her performances. We played Cheng Li de Yue Guang and Luo Ye Gui Gen, which is a sure hit if we don't do it too badly, because everybody likes the song, and it's highly popularized. Had a bit of trouble getting all the chords out though - I couldn't find any online. For Band we performed Helpless When She Smiles by Backstreet Boys. It's the first time I'm playing this kind of 'noisy' song for band, and it's a totally new experience.
I played safe in all my performances but still made mistakes in counting and in one or two chords. Sam commented that my playing is too 'standard', which is both a good and bad thing. Trouble is, I have been performing for the third year in hall by now and still get stage fright (even in hall). Hence, I don't dare to be too adventurous in case something goes wrong. Playing songs of different genre (the Chinese songs were the quiet and soothing kind), kind of got me confused also. I shall not try this again next time. That night, I had to do event reporting for Phoenix Press as well, so going down for the celebrations was really killing three birds with one stone. Or maybe it was four birds, as I told Tirza, because the fourth is myself. I'm behind all my lectures by two weeks! And I have to really force myself to go out to attend tutorials. That's why I'm tired and falling sick on and off now. But at this point of time, my health is back to normal.
The Dynamics project took me a very long time to complete - and it was supposed to be not that difficult. Oh well, at least I get have a hand in most things related in the project this time - with help from Jon, Yew Hong, and a very handy tip from Benjamin (most grateful for that). Now is the tedious part of making the report look nice and complete. After that I'll have to do my lab report and maths homework, and catch up with all my webcast, and learn HYSYS properly. Hopefully that could be done before the finals come. It's not too many weeks away. And yes, there's three more projects (not including this one I'm nearly done with), three more tests and two more presentations to prepare for, before the finals. I haven't included my CCA activities in the list yet.
I went for an interview last Monday and was accepted by Eben Consultants. It is located in Bukit Batok which is very near NUS, so that's a plus point. It means I won't have to wake up at 5-6 am everyday to get to work, which is a good thing. I hope I can learn much from this attachment. I know it's not top-notch like Shell or Esso, but then again, I am well aware of where I stand in the academic food-chain, CAP-wise. In fact, I consider myself very fortunate to be accepted by this company, because it does most of the things I feel I would be more interested in - more towards business, safety and quality control. Hopefully I can cope with both my work and studies next semester. I'm taking two modules on top of my work, and one of them is supposed to be an elective related to my core, so it's not going to be easy.
I don't know why I'm suddenly inserting this here: but I think I'm rather disappointed with the quality of my news event article written for Phoenix Press. I made a mistake in writing down the name of one of the songs performed, and the flow of the report is too methodological to be interesting. As a senior, I should have inserted some more interesting comments/analysis of the situation but at that point of time, my mind was blank, or rather, stuffed with details of my project that I just wanted to finish my event report quickly. Hope I do a better job next time.
