Artic in Sahara

This is the condition of my workplace.

Singapore is like Sahara now. Except Sahara is probably not humid. It is so hot even at 6 am in the morning! Unbearable.

Fortunately, or unfortunately (I don't know which is more apt), my office freezes like Artic. Thankfully I do not sit right under the air con. And thankfully it's just my office so I could always go to other parts of the building to warm up a bit, if I'm desperate.

Air-con seriously reduces my productivity. For someone who rarely goes toilet, I take an hourly break a day (I sit right at the door and the toilet is nice and clean a few steps away). The air-con is so cold that I keep on having to drink hot water to warm myself up (and wrap my bare hands around the hot cup). Today I was rather engrossed in typing and didn't do that, so in the end my fingers ended up really numb. I couldn't type, and I couldn't write until lunch hour came, and I went down to the canteen to de-frost my fingers. Almost couldn't hold my utensils properly too. However after lunch it was not so bad. I guess the calories matter. Literally burning them up haha.

Anyway with the exception of the over-cold temperature, I like my office seat. It is right at the door, means easy access to the water dispenser and cooler. And it's easy for my friends to say hi when they walk past the door, and for people going out to say hi to me too (met many people through that way). Otherwise, interns are rather isolated.

And yay, handed in FYP report yesterday. I regret to say I didn't have much time to check though. And I addressed my professor as 'Associate' instead of 'Assistant' (after asking Yew Hong to check his own)! He sent me an email to clarify. So paiseh. I did that twice, once on the cover page, another in the acknowledgements.

Oh well, at least I saw his first email smiley through this, and he said 'associate sounds better!'. Thankfully I didn't under-address him. That would be really bad. =p

I visited Jurong Library today after work too. Must make use of my $10 investment to borrow books! Ended up with Agatha Christie, after running away from the Chem Eng section. =p The library is a nice place to escape from the sweltering heat too :)

So that's all, I'm going to read the book I borrowed now.

靠著耶穌得勝

Hue Wen shared this song on Facebook today and tagged me.

I remember my first encounter with this song. It was from the album produced by 小羊诗歌, in which has many nice songs that I really liked. A fresh change from Stream of Praise at that time. And I like this song because it brims with hopefulness. Also, it reminds me of Charissa because she introduced this song to the church when she led worship.

I guess I was more or less influenced by this song when I composed 凡事都能做. It was my one and only composed worship song which has been brought out in public, although only for a while. I still remember that day when the church choir sang it. I was in Singapore, but they were singing it in Tampin. Because of this event, the song also reminded me of Mummy and Charissa. Mummy video-recorded the choir singing it and posted it on her Multiply album. Charissa msn-d me about it, and even sent me voice clips singing the chorus of the song. I saved those voice-clips and they are still with me in this laptop. I am very thankful I did, and am thankful that even if my song has not been used for too many things, God was graceful enough to let it contain memories of love for Mummy and Charissa.

Back in those days Philippians 4:13 was my favorite verse. I haven't been claiming it a lot now though. Been tired, and in turmoil, struggling over certain things. Complacency has taken over me. Today pastor preached that there is not much time left. Every second has to be converted to eternity. I pray that I should do that conversion wisely, starting even now. I pray that I will be able to do this, for Philippians 4:13 says 'I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength'.

I still believe in Philippians 4:13. I pray that it will be seen through my life.

Writing non-stop

I generally do not loathe writing reports. It is at most, lots of tedious formatting, sentence-generating, referencing, table-designing and graph-sizing; but it requires no creativity on my part (unlike writing Phoenix articles), or too much thinking/programming. So my right brain could be dead and tired, but my left brain will churn things out. Of course there are a lot of tricky things like tenses (I always get them mixed up), and the need to vary your words a bit so that the same verb/term which is not a technical term does not appear in 30-50% of your report, and cause whoever is reading it to get turned off (at least I'm the type that does). I had lots of training in the past few semesters since I'm mainly in-charge of writing for almost all my group projects.

However, I do not like doing it within a stipulated time-limit, especially when I have less than 5 days to write, edit and print (including work-days). Thank God my professor doesn't like ultra-long and detailed reports, and asked us to stick within 30-50 pages, which is the length of my usual lab reports, and hence, is very much manageable. :) Am grateful to Nick for his report skeleton too (though the content has totally nothing to do with mine). At least I do not have to wreck my brains thinking out the cover page formatting from scratch, and fear that I have forgotten any formatting details or report sections.

These two days I shall exhibit in full blast all my report-writing capabilities, and hopefully by Tuesday night, it shall be over. :)

FYP ending soon

Counting down 4 days plus plus to complete my report! It's really rushed, but it's a kind of rush that makes me 'high' (at least for now).

Our last FYP consultation meeting is just over today, and this is here's a pic of Mei and myself with our mentor Bevan. I don't know how to resize the picture, so this looks weird. Anyway, you can see all of us in it. We were really very fortunate to get Bevan as a mentor. He's very patient in explaining things, doesn't push/stress us out, provides us with literature info as best as he could; and most importantly, I know he did not just help us because we were involved in his project. I really appreciated the fact that he was very mindful of our interests as FYP students, and I learned a lot from this project.

After this half-year FYP experience, I shall take a leaf from his book and be more patient with others (no matter what the issue is). Yes. I shall even try to be patient with the 183 bus driver who literally makes the bus crawl on Clementi's road on my way to work, getting stuck at all the red lights when it's already all jammed up, and making me nearly miss the shuttle bus to work. Maybe when this happens to me again, I'll just think of how patient Bevan was when I asked him near-elementary questions, and I'll tolerate the poor bus driver more.

FYP would have been so different without Mei too. We're the type that like to rant together! And it's fun to have someone else under the same professor and mentor instead of being on my own. Now Mei is working in MSD South and I'm in MSD West. So we somewhat have another common topic to talk about when we see each other.

We didn't really have much actual meet-ups with our Professor, but what I like about him is that he tries his best to help and get us interested in the project, and believes the best there are in people. In fact he has more confidence in us than we have in ourselves. Usually when this happens, I will think that this is because 'he hasn't seen our report yet', which may be true. But this time I shall take it a different way, and learn to have more confidence in what I can do too. :) I tried adopting this mindset in my work place and it seems to have put me in brighter spirits.

So now I shall try not to have such a phobia of new and 'difficult' stuff, and learn to make the most of what I have! And now I'll have to somehow churn out a beautiful report for the little data I have. :) All the best to other FYP students too!