Shine Jesus Shine FAIL
FOC2009’s gone, and so is rally, and bidding, which means the summer break is about to follow suit as well. And so far, the whole summer has been strangely unsatisfying. There’s no reason for this, but I’ve spent the entire summer with dread, this sense of impending doom. What kind of doom, I have absolutely no clue.
I thought the “doom” would go away after FOC, but it didn’t, because we jumped straight into the Rally project. So I thought it would go away after the Rally, which was MM’s last major project, and it didn’t. There was no “Thank God it’s finally over,” not immediately after the rally, not 3 days after, not a week… not ever. It just felt like any other day.
It’s like as if the fact that I can finally put my feet up and chill never really sank in. I’ve still got this overwhelming sense of dread, like as if Facebook is going to be revamped with a Hello Kitty theme, but I don’t use Facebook, so that wouldn’t be so bad… Or like as if BMW’s going to pull out of Formula 1, which is actually going to happen. They’re leaving Formula 1 at year’s end and leave the Sauber Team to die an even more horrible death than they already are this season. It would make my BMW Sauber cap a really cool cap to have though, because the team wouldn’t exist anymore, or at least exist under a different name…
And then there was the CSS AGM, which didn’t help to reassert any sense of normalcy either. Not that it was an extremely important personal thing for me or anything, but I’m just glad we didn’t have more freshmen present, or who knows what they might start thinking of us. I shan’t delve into anymore details. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t entirely bad. It was just… extremely weird, as I’m sure most people would agree.
But I’m not dreading any of that nonsense. I’ve spent the entire summer like this. I can’t even take a proper break and take my mind off everything, ’cos I don’t even know what my mind is on. Is it the impending semester and all its work? Irrational paranoia that I may lose some good people this semester? Money problems? IPPT? That I’ve lost my mind because I don’t know what it’s on??
I’m dreading something, but I don’t know what.
Everything’s breaking down around me. First up, on Saturday, it was my phone. I turned it on, and it just gave me a blank stare. And by blank, I mean BLANK – empty. Ok, fine, I could see the wallpaper, but that was it! It didn’t respond to user inputs at all, so it basically became a rather fancy looking paperweight. Anyhow, I took it to the Sony Ericsson service centre, and checked in the phone, which was a really stupid thing to do. I had to pay $10.70 upfront so they’d send it to their workshop. So now I have to wait 3 working days for someone from the workshop to call me regarding the bill, before they resume the repair. And if the bill’s too high and I decide not to go ahead with the repair, they keep the $10.70! Talk about a ripoff.
But actually, I’m sorta hoping the bill will get really high, so I’ll have an excuse to get a new phone. Hahaha. Anyway, I’m using this Motorola V3 clamshell phone right now, and over the last 3 days, I’ve assessed the V3’s merits and faults. So here’s the good part about the V3 – the chassis. It’s beautiful, sturdy, and it’s outfitted in matt black, so the whole thing looks really awesome, even though it’s a really basic phone. So yea, I really liked the external design.
But here’s the bad part – I really liked ONLY the external design. The rest of it was, well, lacklustre to say the least. It’s got a really basic feature set. But then again, it’s a really old phone, so I guess that’s ok. But the keypad takes some getting used to. The thin profile of an open V3, and the raised ridge at the bottom of it turns the task of typing messages quickly into a huge challenge. And then there’s the software. It’s not the most user-friendly interface I’ve seen, and it’s really ugly as well.
But I guess a V3 is better than nothing, and I’m trying to grow on it.
So that was Saturday. On Sunday, the printer quit on me too. My attempt at printing notes was foiled when I discovered that the printer wouldn’t power up. And yes, everything that had to be connected, was connected.
So I’m gonna have to go out this weekend to get myself a new printer, and possibly, a new phone. And the IT Fair just ended a week ago, which makes me look kinda retarded. Anyway, I’m not too sure if I need the new phone yet, though the Nokia 6500 does look awfully tempting…
So anyway, after ruing over my downed phone, I watched Sunday’s Australian Grand Prix, and it was brilliant! Both Nick Heidfeld and Nico Rosberg got onto the podium! But maybe the fact that only 7 cars finished the race, out of the 22 that started, had something to do with that. Nonetheless, it’s great seeing both Nic’s on the podium. After the race, I set about revising for the Electrical Engineering that was held earlier this evening. The test went pretty OK, I think. And it made me feel a bit dumb, because everything that I’d prepared for over the weekend didn’t appear in the paper at all. But I guess it doesn’t really matter, as long as I get the results I need, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed.
Up next: The first draft of the position paper is due in 2 days, and my team still has some way to go before we can have a paper that looks decent enough for submission. So, it’s back to work.
Oh, and I’m never getting a Sony Ericsson phone ever again. Ever…
Kimi Raikkonen won the 2007 Formula One Driver’s Championship a week ago, which was just totally unbelieveable! Just a few weeks before that, Lewis Hamilton had a chance to wrap up the Driver’s title for himself, but he threw it all away by beaching his car on the gravel trap just outside the pit lane. A heart-wrenching sight for all the British Hamilton fans, but to me, he’s just getting really arrogant. I mean, Alonso was the reigning 2-time World Champion – give him some respect for goodness’ sake. But on the flipside, Alonso was behaving like a spoilt brat himself, unhappy with the team just because he’s being trounced by a rookie.
In the end, Hamilton and Alonso brought each other down, and allowed Raikkonen to capture the Championship, and what a race it was! If either Hamilton or Alonso had finished one spot higher than they did, they would have seized the crown, but luckily for Kimi, they didn’t.
That’s the difference between Ferrari and McLaren. McLaren’s culture emphasizes equality between the 2 drivers, regardless of the situation, whereas Ferrari’s culture places more emphasis on teamwork. If one driver has a better chance of capturing a championship or race, Ferrari goes all out to help that driver, even if it means slightly compromising the other driver’s strategy. There’s no “right” or “wrong” in this case; it’s just that the teams’ different cultures are better suited to different situations, like in this season, where Ferrari’s attitude of teamwork, allowed Massa to support Raikkonen in his title bid.
I think I’m becoming a Raikkonen fan, but I feel good ol’ Kimster thoroughly deserves that Driver’s trophy. And it’s about time too. He’s been labelled “potential world champion” during the days when Juan Pablo Montoya was still racing for Williams, and now, Kimi can finally remove the word “potential” from his name card.
Anyway, things on the work front, for me, have pretty much remained the same, except that the assignments have mysteriously piled up quite a bit over the last week. I had to start the weekend with 7 tutorials/assignments to complete, which do not include my sociology readings. So this weekend became like any other – 2 whole days bound to my desk by this mysterious device, known to most people as a “pen”, although I have become a bit inefficient in turning assignments around – I’d only completed 3 assignments this weekend, as opposed to the usual 4. I think I’m losing steam, but I can’t really do much about, except for drinking more Red Bull…
This being week 10, all the mid-term results have been announced as well, and they were pretty normal I guess. I mean, I wasn’t expecting anything spectecular, and I could have done a lot worse. There was none of the crap that I had in that statics test over a month ago. I gave my very best, and I’m quite pleased with the overall results. I did fail programming though, but then again, so did half the cohort. The mean score of the test was a 12, which was my score as well, and the full score was a 25 or a 26, which – astonishingly - nobody was able to achieve. I think that fact bears testament to the high level of difficulty of the programming test. I still remember the first programming lecture we had after the results came out. The lecturer told us he was actually quite pleased with our cohort, because he had expected something worse from us. The whole LT just went into a state of shock…
And so ends another 2 weeks. We’re past the “week 10″ mark, which means the final term tests are just around the corner.
Fabulous…
So last week, for some reason, I was looking through the abysmal mess that is my cupboard. Looking through, not searching through, because it was the previous searchings through that made the cupboard so messy in the first place. Anyway, I was looking through it when I came across this book I never got myself to finish reading; “Formula 1 Fanatic”. Not that it was bad or anything, the timing just wasn’t right. The “A” Level exams, then Army, and by the time that was over, I’d forgotten about books already.
So I found the book, and started to read it. “Formula 1 Fanatic”, authored by Koen Vergeer. It was first published in dutch, but since I didn’t understand dutch (and I still don‘t), I bought the English version, translated from the dutch version by David Colmer, who did a brilliant job with the translation, by the way. Ok, I know what you’re thinking; “how apt”, right? Me reading a book about myself…
But no, it wasn’t about myself. But if I were born 20 years earlier than my actual birthdate, it could have been. The book is essentially the history of Formula 1 through the eyes of a fan – Koen Vergeer himself. From the blood sport that it was in the 1950s, to 2002, where it had transformed into a commercialised industry, Vergeer summarises the history, passion and intrigue of Formula 1, add his own thoughts, and puts them all into a neat 300-page paperback. But I wouldn’t call it a summary, because, as short as the book may be, it is filled with so much detail and emotion. Whether he’s describing the events of Imola 1994, that incredible battle between Gilles Villeneuve and Rene Arnoux in 1979, or all those times when a Williams racing car was fitted with faulty wheel nuts, every F1 fan will be able to relate to everything that’s written in that book.
Which doesn’t mean that everybody else would, because if you don’t know who Juan Manuel Fangio, Gilles Villeneuve, Ayrton Senna, or Michael Schumacher are, you probably won’t understand what you’re reading. Then again, if you don’t know who Michael Schumacher is, you’ve probably died 20 years ago.
To sum it up, it’s a great book for any Formula 1 fan. And there’s one line in the book which I found rather interesting. In one of the chapters, titled “The Point of Formula One”, he writes;
“The point of Formula One? Formula One is completely pointless, just like art. Formula One is art.”
And I’m not talking about Cascading Style Sheets here. I came back from the NUS Catholic Students’ Society Freshmen Orientation Camp a few days ago, and it was pretty sweet. And as Nick Lee rightly said to me yesterday when we went out with our group, I can really feel my “social development index” drop after getting involved with the Army, and also after that long period of slacking that I’ve been through (not that I mind slacking for months at a time), but it was still good. I have a really nice group, and we’re starting to go out together a lot, which is something I’m gonna have to get used to after all these months of nothing-ness, but I really don’t mind.
One bad thing about the camp though – it was totally draining. We only had about 10 hours of sleep over 3 nights, with only 1 hour on the last night, but that was mainly because we had to rehearse for the skit, which was kick-ass by the way. It’s a curious thing – I used to be able to survive on very little sleep. Maybe I’m getting old… Anyway, the little group outing on Monday and the lack of sleep meant I had to sleep early on Sunday night, which meant I missed the US Grand Prix! Argh! Them blasted time zones! Now I have to wait till Saturday to watch the highlights.
Which means that right now, I’m probably the only Formula 1 fan on the planet who doesn’t know the US GP results yet.
