End of school and D-Day

School ends. D-day in the form of the A levels in 2 weeks. Can't be more stressed than now.

Anyway, yesterday celebrated belated (1 day) as well as advance birthday for lin' and jess respectively. Forgot all about the way Fish and Co celebrates. So naturally, we all got "clowned". Haha.

On a side note, I guess I'll be able to attend the Prom aka. Graduation Night..Yeah!!! "Muchas Gracias!"

Next Tuesday is the farewell concert as well as the Sportsmen appreciation ceremony. Guess we'll finally know who took over as the 2 Captains of the bowling team.

Don't really have much mood to update actually. This post is so fragmented and without a theme. Oh never mind!!

Ciao.

New Layout

I guess this is obvious. After a day's work, (time slightly wasted), I've finally rolled out a new layout for this blog and will soon port it over to my technology blog http://tech-no-borders.blogspot.com.

This is my first Layout for the new Blogger. It is a full eXtensible Markup Language (XML) template.

There are still some features like tagboard which aren't up yet. I still need to do some fine tuning. so for now please post any comments you have at the respective comments link in the posts. Non-article related comments are also welcomed. Cheers.

And to all my friends, thanks for the concern. I should be going back to school tomorrow.

Cheers!

Powerpoint woes

I guess many may have read, in the recent Digital Life (Straits Times April 10 2007) a study done by Australian researchers show that the use of PowerPoint Presentations, is actually making it harder for students to process information.

The above findings is contrary to the previous stand of many that PowerPoint Presentations are helpful and thus aid students in studying. This is due to the research finding stating that the "human brain retains more information if digested in verbal or written form, but not both simultaneously." (the quote was quoted ad verbatim from The Straits Times, Digital Life, Page 27)..

This finding is in support of what students have already feedback to teachers. The use of PowerPoint exacerbates what is already boring. It makes interesting lessons boring and boring lessons worse.

The situation is made alot worse when the presenter already dumped all the information on the PowerPoint slides and is just reading from it. This coupled with the fact that every other PowerPoint presentation looks the same as it comes from the same set of templates is just unbearable.

To be fair, PowerPoint can be a good supplementary tool for teaching. However, the use of PowerPoint for everything is simply distasteful. In my opinion, it should not be used as a main medium for teaching. It really cuts out the interaction and excitement of a lecture.

But what really marvels me is that why does it need to take a study to prove a point? I believe by now, many students would have complained about excessive use of PowerPoints in school. So the question becomes "Why wait so long for the study?"... "Are things going to change now that the study is out?"

The answer to those questions lie outside my scope...

Ham and strings

Ham and Strings

This post is all about eating Ham and making strings...
Nope.. I wish...But its not.. not about ham and strings but a word that is formed by those two..... thats right.. hamstring..
1.6km PLUS 2.3km PLUS 3km PLUS training (2 hours) AND more training (2 hours) EQUALS to serious muscle ache....
Ok.ok... its probably due to the lack of exercise previously.... I accidentally hurt my hamstring... this is made worse by the fact that a right-handed bowler needs to use my left leg the most... OUCH!!

Oh well... hope it gets well this weekend.. before physical education again on Monday.. If its still bad, maybe I should pay a visit to the physiotherapy clinic which is open in school every Tuesday...

Training

Two new additions to the team today.. more is expected to come next week... YX looked so down today...Blisters on foot etc... Guess we will find an increase in the number of cases as PE these few weeks will be running about 3km each time... Hope she is feeling better..

Forecast

Next week will be quite a horrible week.. I'm not looking forward to the Chemistry lecture test results. Though I'm quite ok with Economics....

Looks like our class is going to be some "sample" at a survey again... This time is for some Maths thing.. unclear its purpose though. We're suppose to go there and do some test which we don't even know is on what topic. I guess it'll be a general test similar to those Australian Maths Competition papers ...

Oh well....

A few things

Just for fun, I'll reverse the order of the points my post this time... haha

Random-ness

I know this is totally random, but yea.. I thought it was quite innovative to put the ashtray in a swivel design... haha

Sportsman Appreciation Talk

Today marks the official day that all JC2 PDP heads stepped down. Thus is also marks the new exco official undertaking of their appointment. The rest of us got our certificate of appointment... Sadly.. there there was a glitch somewhere... Won't elaborate further... haha

Haze

The haze isn't getting any better. SG hit a high PSI of 106 and stayed in the unhealthy range for quite sometime. Below is a picture taken in school... The buildings are supposed to be clear...

Finally the green light for SJI (International)

Just in the news a while ago. Its announced that the Ministry Of Education has approved the application for the opening of the third international school in Singapore.

St. Josephy's Institution (SJI) International is now officially recognised. An announcement will be made to the current students and parents soon... I think recruitment has already started. Even the new principal for SJI(International) has been chosen.

I wonder we will hear from the SJI Old Boys Asscociation (SJIOBA) too... haha

YAY!

Attaching tomorrow.... and 4 other things

5. Things in total.

1. IMCB

haha... Funny heading. But yar.. tomorrow will be reporting to the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology (IMCB) instead of school. Oh man... Its so far... all the way to biopolis... But I aren't going to complain...

Missing a few tests though... Have to do a make-up for those... (i.e. going back to school during the holidays to do)...

I already cleared my "tests deficit"... I sat for the this wednesday's Chinese test in advance last friday.... Then I sat for the long overdue biology test on eukaryotic and prokaryotic genome today. Going to do the economics test during the holidays... Don't know about the maths test though....

Whats more, I'll be missing teacher's day celebration... so sad... cannot go back to my secondary school as I'll be dismissed at 5pm from IMCB.

haiz... guess I'll just have to make do with an sms to my teachers...

2. Pluto

Yup. I'm sure many of you have read or heard about it by now. Our solar system has shrunk.. We have 8 planets now as opposed to what we used to believe. This is because of the demotion of pluto from a planet to a dwarf planet.

This demotion arised from the new consensus among astrologist/scientist who agree to a new definition of a planet. Thus although we have 11 objects of masses (inlcuding Xena and another dwarf planet), only 8 are full planets now.

So now, other than the sun, we have Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Urananus, Neptune. Effectively, the common way in which we learnt the planets of the solar system last time (i.e. My Very Excellent Mother Just Serve Us Nine Pies)have to go without the pies.

3. Fun with Firefox

It really marvels me the things you can do in firefox. haha... Was playing around with some plugins.

My google homepage:

My Gmail login page

Those photos are really screenshots of my computer.. and not an edited image... Lolx

Its quite fun playing with user applied stylesheets... Although they are visible only on my computer.. But the results are quite statisfying. You can actually turn certain sites which you find difficult to read, or sites that has layouts which you don't quite like into something visibly pleasing to you.

4 .About YouTube

I heard that youtube has revised its site terms... So its advisable for those who upload there to take a look at the site terms again.

5. Site design

I've been thinking of it for a while but haven't really got to designing it yet. I've got a few concepts currently in mind. Since its been so long already, I've decided that I will give a total overhaul to this blog as well as to my website.

This web will undergo base r-ecoding, which will re-shuffle everything into a hierarchical order, from masthead to navigation to content. All these are really part of semantic web coding. The current layout, has taken a step into CSS, but it hasn't really reached a standard which I like. There were still some workarounds which I employed. Moreover, it definitely has some accessiblity issues which needs to be ironed out. I was also thinking of using some AJAX to spice up the blog interactivity, or even add a portfolio of my past designs.

As for the main site, I'm still learning the ins and outs of a Content Management System (CMS). It the CMS system prove too much, I may just resort to wordpress, a blogging system.

oh well... so much to do, so little time....

求其上，得其中,
求其中，得其次.

EXpensive COmmittee

"Whats that?" you may ask. actually its just a joke we came up with at the Bowling EXCO meeting today. Supposed to represent Executive Committee. But we joked about it. Went to Haagen-Daz.. Haha..

Anyway, back to the issue (and I still haven't type the minutes of meeting...), discussed quite a bit today, especially on the future prospects of the team. Got quite a number of problems already. And we have many things to plan.

For starters, the resuming of training, the time as well as the second DSA trial. The rest of the meeting will be released when the appropriate time comes.

In the morning, was also our implementation of our Project Work. Enfresdezh got quite angry as they were coming in late. However, it was quite fun. Played basketball, captains ball and soccer. Too bad I had to leave for my meeting before I could get a chance to use the gym. Surprisingly, we managed to get the gym key.

Tomorrow will be another hectic day. They are saying that they want to go East Coast Park. Sighz. It is really a huge problem. Don't even know how to go home from there. No bus to any place which I can take another transport home. So troublesome!!!!

Arrrgh!!!!!

So far, there hasn't been time for any study. All the time taken by school and other commitments. Getting abit frantic about JCT. Mext week will be National Age Group. Again no time to study.

No choice. The only other thing I can do is to depend on luck. LOL.