Feel free to flame in the new forum

For 99% of the visitors here who didn't notice the new forum link at the top, I have created a new forum for all of you to use.

So feel free to trash out the stuff buried in your heart !

http://badguyswin.mybb3.org

Vesak day email and World Class Facilities at YMCA

On Monday, taking advantage of the Vesak day holiday, I wrote an email to our Danny Toohey in the wee hours of Monday morning to try to put an end to the nonsense to ICT306 Software Architecture. I knew I was going to write to a person whose native language is English. Thus I tried very hard to squeeze as much mileage as I can from my 'O' level English certificate.

And so here is the naked and uncensored content of my message to Mr Danny

Dear Sir,

I will like to bring a matter of great importance to your attention regarding our first 2 sessions for ICT306 Software Architectures.
According to our study guide, we are suppose to cover topic 1 in session 1 and topic 2 in session 2.

However, our first 2 sessions on May 11 and May 13 covered none of the material in the 2 topics. We noted that our lecturer did not use the lecture material on both sessions, prompting the BIS1 class to wonder if the lecturer had access to the study material.

On May 13 night, the study material was made available to the students and we found that what the lecturer had covered were not as what is detailed in the topic 1 and 2 slides. Instead of covering the course info & introduction and client-server architecture, we were given what is best described as a beginner's programming class using Java. I am very sure that after going through 2 trimesters of C and C++ programming, we do not need to be instructed on what is an variable or function.

This is a grave concern as this means that we have been fooled into wasting time to attend 2 sessions which were essentially worthless. That leaves us with less time to actually cover the topics needed for this subject. We are now behind schedule by 2 sessions and we will like to know how are we suppose to be compensate for this.

Right now, we have many questions in our mind that we will like someone to answer.
- Is there going to be 2 make up sessions? Is examinations going to be delayed by 2 weeks?
- Why is the lecturer not given the relevant teaching materials? How can classes start without the relevant materials?
- How come we are not informed about this? Trying to cover things up this way certainly is an insult to me, personally. We are not adolescents, but working adults, so please respect that.

I find this outrageous and very unfair to us. We are full paying students paying with our own money for what APMI Kaplan promised us during orientation as "World Class Education Experience". Unfortunately, for every trimester, things just get worse along the way, to the extend that even the lecture content becomes virtually non-existence to us. If the lecturer starts inventing their own material without telling us that there is no relevance to our examinations, and without our acknowledgment, what is the point of paying and going for classes? This is a serious breach of integrity and trust. We are not trying to be difficult but this clearly sub-standard.

Our next class is on May 20. If the situation does not improve, we will boycott this subject outright since there is no value in attending classes. We have also little faith in the lecturer to deliver the subject material properly after realising that we have been hood-winked.

Please do something about this and give us a satisfactory outcome on this matter.

In protest,

Foong Jia Khang
BIS1

So, the email pretty summed up everything I had to say regarding the matter. To Mr Danny's credit, he reverted back at 10am promising us that he would be looking into it. Obviously, he didn't read my previous email to him which contained the link to Singapore National Holidays. He put in effort to try to ring up everyone in Kaplan but got no response because it's Vesak day here.

In the end, our next lesson on Tuesday was Topic 1 and Topic 2 at YMCA. APMI Kaplan ran out of space and decided to dump us there for the whole week. We heard that they had dumped diploma course students from rumors but never did we imagine that we will get the same treatment. The YMCA building is so sad that even MacDonalds have to close their doors because their business sucks so bad, hence we didn't have high hopes for the facilities there.

At least BIS2 got sent to Meridian Hotel...do APMI Kaplan hate BIS1 so much that they rather save money and dump us at YMCA?

Warning, the pictures taken below sucks because of my sad O2 Atom's lousy built-in camera. I am also too lazy to photoshop them before posting.

Behold the World Class Facilities experience at YMCA !

The classroom didn't come with a projector screen. We have tried to display the projector image on the white board but the resulting glare is so bad that I could feel my migraine coming. I got pissed off and disrupted the lesson until the problem was resolved.

Our AV equipment expert Hui Ming rotated the projector to the right and used the wall as the projector screen. At least my head will not hurt now.

The World Class Facilities at YMCA also came with world class markers. The blue marker was so faint that it was as good as invisible ink and the red marker squeaked so loudly that it hurts my ear drums.

It really brought a sense of deja-vu to me when I first saw the class furniture. These are the same tables and chairs that I had last used during my secondary school days.

We found several test papers below the desks. We got a scholar here doing 4/30 for English. Fantastic, the marker must have finished marking the paper in 1 minute flat.

And there is Internet access... prepaid ... you have to pay the hotel to use their internet facilities. There is also insufficient power points should we all bring our notebooks.

That's all for now, let's see what will happen in BIS1 never ending saga of screw-ups. Some of the BIS1 guys already felt desolated and rejected from the way that we were handled. Our program manager Juiliana had left, making her the 2nd program manager to leave our cursed cohort to our doom. I guess that we are doomed to get a change of program manager every trimester because we are so hard to please.

Born prematurely, dead on arrival

Sometimes, I really hope I can stop complaining about my degree course but with the regular disruptions in our promised "world-class education experience", my blog has been filled with bad one experience after another.

Our 3rd trimester started just after a week's break from the trimester 2's examinations. All seems well, except for one major problem with subject, ICT306 Software Architecture. The first half of the first lesson is the typical get-a-feel session ripped right off the study guide as expected. However, when the second half of the first lesson resumed after the break, things started to make a turn for the worse.

The lecturer for the subject is Malar, and she didn't prepare the slides before coming to class. She tried to access the Murdoch's website to retrieve the slides but the APMI Kaplan's Wifi connection did not cooperate with the PC in the classroom. That was strange as we were not having any problems with the Wifi connection on the day. We tried logging into Murdoch's website on our laptops but the material was not available yet for all the subjects.

This is strange as the other 2 subjects that we had went through earlier in the week were instructed with lecture slides despite that they were not available on Murdoch's website. I can only conclude that the local lecturers involved were given the slides before hand, with the exception of Malar.

The moment she started using the marker to teach us the basics of programming in Java, I knew this is going to be a total waste of time. She went through extremely basic stuff that should have been taught to a layman rather than IT graduates who had just undergo 2 trimesters of intense C and C++ programming.

I was expecting a lesson structure with a description of software architecture, not a basic lesson in programming using Java ! It is suppose to be hard, but instead, it was so easy that it actually felt ridiculous. Towards the end of the day, it dawn on me that Malar actually had nothing to teach us, and she was probably wasting our time by filling in with semi-related nonsense. So in the end, I felt that I had just wasted a Sunday morning learning about things that shouldn't even be taught to us. If I knew things were to turn out this way, I would have rather hug my pillow and pig it out at home. What a waste of time !

The next lesson was 2 days after on Tuesday. Things didn't improved. Malar still didn't have any slides and she went on wasting our time on basic programming stuff. I gave up listening to her nonsense and spent the whole night surfing the internet. I didn't expect to learn what is a variable or how to return result from methods, I was expecting to learn the difference between C/C++ and Java. She could have just tell us the difference and get it over with.

She couldn't get the Java SDK and a Java code editor installed on the PC in the classroom due to the lack of administrator rights. Instead of accepting our offer to loan her one of our personal laptop with the properly installed software, she spurred our offer and proceeded to code in notepad, with the compulsory syntax errors as part of the education package. This is needless and a waste of our time.

Then Malar stunned me with her explanation of objects in Java. For the Java coders out there, the code snippet below should be familiar. She was using a similar example for her explanation.

//Defining class Something
class Something
{
//A string named as variable1
String variable1;

//assign a value to variable1
variable1="Hello";
}

//creating a variable with type object, with a reference to
//a new instance of the Something object
Something object1=new Something();
Something object2=new Something();

//access the content of the objects
System.out.println(object1.variable1);
System.out.println(object2.variable1);

Instead of explaining the above statement correctly as I have commented above, she explained a piece of code without the use of the 2 key terms, object and instance! It didn't make any sense at all! My NYP lecturer back in my poly days drilled us until we understood what object and instance means, and without understanding the two key terms, it is impossible to learn what is Java all about.

Then she went on to describe wrongly how multiple instances of the object stores their variables separately and are accessible separately. The correct way to explain it is that each instance of the object has it's own memory space to store it's own variables inside it but guess what? She told the class that the Java is able to do this akin to an array in C! That's absurd! And of course, she explained the whole thing without the use of the key terms, object and instance.

Disgusted, I switched off for the remaining of the lesson, spending time to rip episodes of Bleach off Youtube instead. Not only the lesson had no lesson structure due to the lack of lecture slides, whatever she was doing was so basic that it could have been done in 30 minutes tops. Indeed, she ran out of things to crap about and class was terminated 30 minutes earlier.

The more I think about it, the angrier I was. I had this feeling that the 2 lessons were done without any lecture materials at all, and thus were conjured out of the air just to fill in the first 2 lessons until the lecture material are ready. I have learn nothing new at all, and thus the lesson is a complete waste of time. Later in the night, I went to Murdoch's website and found that the course material was now available.

My suspicion was confirmed when I went through lecture topic 1 and 2. The lecture slides and the lessons that we had went through were completely different. The lecture slides had much more than what was taught in the first 2 lessons. There wasn't any software architecture to be found, just plain old Java programming. In short, the course material was not ready and yet lessons was started without informing us about the problem! BIS1 are short changed yet again! Such dishonesty must not be tolerated!

I will be rallying for support from my fellow BIS1 course mates to confront APMI Kaplan on the matter. Each lesson cost $200 on average and I am not going to let them get away with wasting 2 of my lessons on rubbish. That's $400 !!! This is crucial as if there is no makeup lessons, we have to squeeze the actual course material into the remaining lessons, which is terribly unfair to us. If we factor in the amount we spent needlessly on transportation and food because of the useless lessons, APMI Kaplan had done a good job in wasting our time and money.

Screw it, just when we are just about to get over the examination schedule fiasco of trimester 2, another cock-up occurred right away to mess up everything. This promise of "world-class education experience" is anything but the opposite.

Oh by the way, we were notified today that our next week's classes were all relocated to YMCA instead of APMI Kaplan campus. It appears that APMI Kaplan didn't assign our classrooms before our lesson started. Perhaps we were just an after-thought all along. And if my future-telling skills do not fail me, the lessons at YMCA will be done without providing us with sufficient power points for our laptops and internet access. Over-sight and failure to learn from past mistakes is part of their culture.

Round 3 begins ...

Saved by a paperclip

On Thursday, the most expensive MP3player that I have ever bought refused to work as my mobile phone as well. Hmmph MP3 player working as a phone ? Yah, that's the O2 Atom I am using.

I broke 8 stylus because of my butter fingers

You see, on the 8th of August 2006 (that's a easy to remember date for the fellow patriots to remember right?), I was shopping for a mp3 player that can display a full playlist. However, none of the MIC Ipod clones could do that. My Nokia 6610 keypad was already malfunctioning, and I still have a burning desire to get another PDA after my old Palm III gave up the ghost 2 years ago.

PocketMusic is a clone of Winamp, my favorite MP3 player.

All the ingredients of the perfect storm were ready. So I purchased an O2 Atom, a PDA phone. As the term PDA phone suggest, it's a good PDA with lousy phone functions. I got Pocket Music installed and slapped a 2GB mini-SD card to get my 2GB MP3 player that can show a full playlist. Therefore, 8 August 2006 went down into my history books for the day that I spent the most $$$ on an impulse purchase.

Fast forward back to 8th May, the O2 Atom started to give me problems. The headphone jack was malfunctioning. It thought that a headphone was plugged in, so it could not take any calls without a hands-off kit.

I went around look for a shop which can get it fixed but none stocked replacement parts for the O2 Atom. That's what you get for buying a non-main stream phone. Getting desperate, I started to look for new PDA phones but I was trying very hard not to because I wanted to look at the upcoming G-phones first.

This is unrelated but I can't resist. Ta da !The annoying Microsoft Office 97 paper clip which is a classic example of bad UI design.

And so I went for the best cure all solution of all, performing a google search in hope of a solution. Well, I got what I wanted in 5 minutes. There is a post in a forum that pinpoints the problem to a stuck switch inside the earphone jack. By inserting a paper clip into the correct spot, the problem is resolved!

The morale of the story is ...

• Don't buy a non-main stream phone
• PDA phones is a PDA with phone functions, not a phone with PDA functions
• Google is your best friend
• And lastly, keep a paper clip around you always, you will never know when it can save the day !

The good news and the bad news

Lets start with the good news first

Trimester 2 results
My 2nd trimester results was released this afternoon, just 2 weeks after the exams. That's fast, and my results was surprising good. The hellish 2 weeks of preparation and 1 week of leave was worth it. But I will still stick with my plan to take 2 subjects per trimester. Now for the Brewserk celebration session .. heh

And the bad news...

Stupid Phone
My O2 Atom ear piece jack is not working properly. I can only take and make calls using the hands off kit, which is a lousy piece of shit. This phone has barely made it passed 1.5 years and it better not die before a decent G-phone is out in the market.

Big Fat Poison Arrows
Because that I have worked overtime this evening, I was also rewarded and assigned to tackle a problematic project with has a vendor who cannot commit resources and have to liaise with an infamous user. I hope that I will not be the 3rd casualty in my team to fail to get the project to work out properly.

And APMI Kaplan screws up yet again
We were told that the first lesson for Software Architecture will be on Sunday, but no time was set in the time table. It was only when one of my fellow course mate emailed our course coordinator, that we knew it was already scheduled on Sunday 2pm to 5pm. Then later in the evening, we were informed that it should be 10am to 1pm. The fact that the lecturer is from India made me uncomfortable too. It sounds like a cost cutting move and I made a promise to my course mates that I will walk out of class if the lecturer speaks in heavy cannot-be-understood-ed Indian accent. Let's wait and see.

The Myth of the 2 Wheelers

It's seems to be in our Singaporean culture that we always have to ask where do everyone else live on our tiny island and our mode of transport, at least once. It's like chatting up someone with the generic one liners like : "Have you eaten?" and "How's the weather?"

And when it's my turn to answer the question, I can tell that many people are surprised to hear that I have been cycling to the MRT station in shirt and pants for as long as I have worked. In fact, I have been cycling during my secondary and poly days too. There are a couple of factors which make it very appealing for me to do so ...

And so here is the obviously pro-bicycle Q & A !

Q : How much time do you save ?

A: Quite some.

1. Walking - 15 mins
2. Bus - 20 mins
3. Taxi - Don't have $$$ to try
4. Cycling - 5 mins

You see, it's not hard to make a choice on the mode of transport to get to the MRT station. The more time that I save on transportation, the more time I can pig, and hence the later I can stay awake in the wee hours. It's also very economical and environmentally friendly.

Q : Don't your shirt smells after all that physical activity ?

A: Actually no. I perspire less than walking and walking to the bus stop. How can this be ? Yes, the HDB block that I am living in, is located on a gentle slope. That means in the morning, I just have to glide down the slope to the flat road leading to the MRT station. It helps greatly when my bike is not the cheapo Carrefour or Giant sub $100 bikes. So the amount of physical activity from cycling is actually less than walking. It is also quite cool to cycle in the morning, so any perspiration will dry up quickly.

Q: You mean a cheapo bike cannot make it?

A: Many people didn't know the difference between the cheapo bikes and the more expensive bikes. For many, a cheapo bike is a no-frill MIC 2-wheelers which you get to rent in our parks. All bikes have wheels, so why pay more ? The obvious difference is that anything beyond $150 will give you forward suspension, and if you are willing to pay beyond $300, you will get an alloy frame, rather than a steel frame which weights a ton.

Q: Then what do I get for more than $300?

A: Depending on what you choose that is.

1. Sealed bottom bracket ball bearings
   This is a big draw. It convert most of your physical movement into actual movement, not lost to friction due to cheap sleeve bearings. The bicycle will also glide much longer too, saving a lot of physical work. The cheap sleeve bearings are also susceptible to wear and tear. On the average, I worn out 2 pairs of sleeve bearings a year before I see the light and change to sealed bearings.
   
   
2. Good wheels with ball bearings.
   Similar to the above, the bicycle glides longer without additional physical input.
   
   
3. Pedals with ball bearings.
   Yes there are all bearings too ! I personally like aluminum pedals for their better grip in wet conditions. Add point 1 to 3 together and you get a bicycle that goes a long way per pedal cycle.
   
   
4. Gear sets and gear shifters.
   All mountain bikes come with gear shifters. Unfortunately, not all are able to change gears properly. The better bikes come with gear shifters that will always change at 1 gear stop at a time, every time. You will appreciate this when riding on slopes.
   
   
5. Brakes that works.
   I had experience with cheapo bikes that didn't have proper working brakes right off the shelves, and I can assure you that's very dangerous. Cheapo bikes brakes do not grip evenly or hard enough on both sides of the wheel. Some braking pads are so bad that they will wear out in a matter of weeks. Speed without control is suicide and I will refuse to ride a bike without working brakes. My bike's 3 years old brake pads are still working well so far.
   
   
6. Rust resistance.
   The more expensive bikes do not rust, at least for most of the components. You just have to spray some WD40 and you are done. The junks that you see rusting at the MRT station are rusting because they are made of steel and not oiled.
   
   
7. Bicycle seat.
   For some reason, I couldn't pull off the bicycle seat completely even after loosening the bolts securing it. That's why it's not stolen yet...ha ha.
   
   
8. Suspensions.
   Sub $100 bikes come with none. $150 bikes comes with forward suspension. $250 will give you full suspension. So pay $250? No! Then idea of having suspension should be from a safety aspect. The forward suspension will be sufficient for you to keep your hands from flying off the handle bar. If you get a $250 bike with full suspension, it's very likely that every other part on the bike is crappy. It will also make the bike a natural giant magnetic target for bicycle thieves at your favorite MRT station.

Q: Then if I buy such an expensive bike, it will only get stolen! I know that [INSERT NAME]'s bike was stolen, and it was a cheap bike at that!

A: The value of the bicycle does not matter. The duration that it was left at the MRT station isn't either. It is how it is secured. I have never lost a bike before at the MRT station, even if i's overnight parking. I used a motorcycle lock and a heavy chain lock to secure both wheels to the body frame, which makes it hard for the typical opportunist bicycle thief to steal it. It will take heavy equipment to saw through the 2 locks, taking a long time and make a lot of noise.

My last $300 bike was lost after 3 years of use because my mom borrowed my bike and refused to use my locks. Instead, she happily ignore me and used a cheap and light $10 lock for her own convenient and lost the bicycle within a week. She came up with all sort of excuses such as conspiracy theories but refuses to acknowledge her error. My next bike cost over $500 and it is still in operation for the 4th year running now. Oh the locks cost slightly under a hundred bucks, making it more expensive than some of your cheapo MIC bikes.

Q: What did you buy? Can you show a picture of it?

A: I am not attaching a photo of my bike in case someone read this and target my bike. ROFL.

That's all folks. Hope this article will clear up the misconception on bicycles.

Ironman

I have just caught Iron Man on Friday night and it's certainly quite entertaining. A recommend watch for the Super Heroes type of movies, and I am not referring to the dump ass Super Heroes Movie.

As a show of goodwill, IBM passed 10 free tickets to Friday night's Iron Man movie to the infrastructure team earlier this week. It's sort of like a kickback for awarding them contracts and usually, the tickets will be distributed among the infrastructure team. So on Friday, we were expecting the ticket holder on our side to allocate us some tickets by the end of the day.

Strangely, for some odd ball reason, the ticket holder claimed that the tickets have already been given out despite that none of our team members received any. We smelt a rat but did not confront the ticket holder in order to preserve world peace. So for the guys who were dead bend on watching the movie, we had to consider alternative plans and explore further options.

All reasonably good seats at Vivo City were sold out, so we bought tickets for Tiong Bahru at Vivo City. Yes, the ticketing systems are interlinked for GV. You can buy tickets from any GV cinemas for any GV cinemas.

At the popcorn counter, I got a shock. A popcorn, a drink with a lousy toy goes for $9 bucks. That's robbery, so I didn't get any. It's too expensive ! I think I will smuggle my own next time I visit a GV cinema. And thus, GV's attempt to rip me off failed.

As for the movie, it has good dialogs and funny scenes, with a twisted sense of humor which kept the audience laughing. The CG is good and the characters are pretty well played. The only grief is the short battle scene between and the big fat grey robot and Iron Man at the end. I thought it was War Machine but there was no named given to it, so let's just call it the big grey fat robot for now.



For the 99% of the folks who don't read the comic, the light in the center of the armor is the power source. It's suppose to be a super high tech battery that keeps Iron Man alive, a job that was initially done with an acid battery. However, the playboy Tony Stark built the super high tech and powerful battery to replace the acid battery. I personally find this part insanely unbelievable. If the power source is powerful enough to power his Iron Man armor, it will be required that the power source generate 99.99999% pure power and almost no heat....or our super hero here will be fried and toasted. Ok forget the science.

This will have been seriously cool to see this in glorious Hollywood CG.

I was expecting to see the big ass Proton Cannon blasting the hell out of everything that moves but all Iron did was fire some micro missiles, precision machine gun and flies around. He got his uni-beam and strong punch from the Marvel Super Heroes line of games from Capcom though.

I want this !!! Kill someone !!!

Overall, this movie is justifiable to watch on the screens for $10 bucks. Not suitable for kids though due to the dark adult character of Iron Man.