U-Tribe!

Had U-Tribe yesterday at Pulau Ubin with KEL Zone and it was a resounding success! There were 12 Teams/Tribes of Israel each with about 7-9 members. I had the chance to lead the Benjamin Tribe!

Yes, it’s been a long time since I went crazy and ran around. It did feel good like I was releasing the stress I had buried in me. Also, it was my first time at Pulau Ubin, don’t laugh!

There were several stuff that got me thinking/I didn’t know about.
1. Oh so there are people living there
2. Pulau Ubin is quite BIG
3. How can anyone survive without a bus/MRT?
4. This doesn’t look one bit like Singapore
5. Was I in a foreign land?
6. I freaking washed my hands in murky brown water
7. I so can’t imagine myself living there
8. Why are the toilets located so far away?
9. The rental for the bicycles is cheap though ($2)

Don’t call me princess or anything, I bravely sucked it up without complaining much (except for the water bomb part, explain that later). These were just some stuff going through my mind.

I had a great time knowing my tribe members and I’m glad they were enthusiastic, supportive and cooperative as a tribe. So proud of them.

The mass game was the craziest one. Water bomb. Let me tell you this, they aren’t any ordinary water bombs, when I saw that they were colourful, two things came to mind. One, after a long run, finally something to drink! Two, what kinda concoction did they come up with?!

Should have known, sea water, soy sauce, ink, egg yolk, flour and any other weird stuff you can think of.

There I was, sitting so quietly looking around when suddenly someone stood behind me and said “Hi Shirley”. The next thing I knew, some liquid landed on my head and I began to reek. Yeah, imagine that. He did it twice! Second time, it landed right smack on my back. Boy was it painful. Thanks Kelvin. Haha.

It was all in the name of fun. Everyone was running around with the colourful water bombs and you can probably guess how bad everyone smelt after the game. All in all, I had fun and I also became two tones darker. The mosquitoes didn’t spare me either. My legs feel wobbly and the muscle aches have kicked in. HAHAHA.

I’d like to thank Kevin, Zaccheus, ChinMing, Kevin, Tania and Angel for helping me out. You guys are awesome! Hope to see you around aite

MY LAST DAY OF SCHOOOOOOOL

26 NOVEMBER 2009.
It was a bittersweet experience traveling to school this week, knowing it’s the final week before we enter the real world. It’s not like I’m graduating tomorrow or something but it was the very last time I’m going to SP to attend normal lessons.

I kinda felt the pinch on Tuesday (24Nov), when I reached campus at 730am to prepare myself for PP CA2 interview. I doubt I ever gone to school that early alone before. The feeling was great. No crowds, no rush, no distractions, just me walking all by myself thinking, reflecting. I seldom take slow walks to School of Business.

While walking, I was thinking through the 3 years, people I’ve met, known, forgotten, don’t wanna remember. There were so many places in school where memories were created. That thought made me smile for a while.

Then as I looked up at the big red “I want I can @ SP” banner, I can’t help but to think of the friendships that were made and how it progressed. However, there were some memories, I really don’t wish to relive.

I guess, my experience in school was awesome. I didn’t regret taking the polytechnic route at all. It did open my eyes to the real world and how’s everything is in shades of grey.

I’ll miss you guys, lecturers, course mates and classmates.
I had fun.

Year 1

Year 2Year 3 – DMC 3B05

Entire cohort!

I survived Friday the 13th!

I can’t believe in this day and age, I could actually forget to bring my mobile phone out with me. There are several electronic devices I can never leave home without, namely my iPod Classic, my HTC Touch Diamond 2 and my Sony T300 camera. Apparently, I forgot my phone on the fateful Friday the 13th.

The strangest part was I didn’t realise it till I was in the train en route to campus. I begun searching through my bag franctically hoping that my precious is not lost, only to realise that yes, I left it on the dining table. Great.

My reflex thought was: “I got to so tweet thing NOW”. It was a -smack forehead- moment because my phone’s not with me to tweet and it’s not logical to whip out my laptop for an eight minute train ride to Jurong East. It sure did feel like the beginning of a bad day.

I was supposed to be in school early for the class phototaking session and I didn’t know where’s the venue. How awesome right? I closed my eyes and mumbled a prayer before the train reached Dover station. I was right on time and luckily, Stella was waiting at the station! You have no idea how relieved I was there and then.

The rest of the day was quite a breeze because my brain didn’t fail me when I wanted to recall some phone numbers. With the help of Twitter, Facebook and MSN Messenger, contacting people via social media proved to be pretty much possible.

That got me thinking, do we still spend a lot of time using our mobile phones to make phone calls or are we using it to access social media websites? Yes, one can always argue that a mobile phone’s main purpose is for making calls especially during emergencies. Other than that, most of your friends are connected to you one way or another via social media.

Even so, we use mobile phones to go online because, well, it’s mobile. It takes away the hassle of switching on your laptop just to check an update.

It so happened that it was an emergency-free day and I survived!

Random thought.
The main purpose of mobile phones might become diluted one day~

Thought you should know

NEVER EVER HANG YOUR DIRTY LAUNDRIES IN PUBLIC.

By that, I mean never publish your dirty little secrets or your hatred for someone online. I can assure you that somehow or rather, it can be traced. Who knows, five years down the road, you might regret doing what you did when you’re younger be it on Facebook, Twitter or any other online medium.

Just so you know, future employers/fellow employees now make use of the internet to find out stuff about you and what you’re saying about them. It’s a whole new level of stalking/research altogether. What with all the new technologies that are emerging in today’s society, a stranger you never knew existed might know you so well, it’s freaky.

So please, maintain a healthy reputation online. It might cause you your job.

I don’t know why but I’ve been thinking about this, so for the benefit of mankind, I’ve decided to write an entry about it. You MIGHT wanna thank me someday

P.S. You can’t hide behind that screen for long.

Exposed.

Yet another guest speaker (Pat Law) for today’s lecture. It was pushed to one hour before and started at 8am. Early? Yes! After being chided on Monday for being late, we have reformed! I was 10 minutes early today.

It was quite an eye-opening lecture. We visited several sites that gave me a whole new perspective to stalking someone/following trending topics. It’s freaky how much information you can find about yourself on the World Wide Web!

Let me introduce you some quite awesome sites!
Daymix
Whostalkin
Google Reader
Twitalyzer (Measure your impact and Success on Twitter)

Try it out!

Did you know that if Facebook were a country, it’d be bigger than the whole of Japan! Singapore alone has about 500,000 Facebook users.

My take on Twitter

Well for NCT lecture, we had a special guest speaker who came and spoke to us about the importance of Twitter and how it can be part of you everyday life. She’s a freelance writer (Stephie Says) who owns a blog shop (Stephie’s Shop) and is also the co-founder of a local fashion blog (Fashion Nation).

I’d say, everyone would wanna have her kind of lifestyle. Being paid to write stuff and she even gets invited to go overseas to cover certain events. I didn’t know blogging can get you quite far. Interesting career ain’t it?

I can’t help but agree that Twitter is indeed becoming an integral part in our lives. I personally joined Twitter exactly 2 months ago and to date, I have 1,067 tweets! Don’t be scared okay? HAHA. I used to have the misconception that Twitter is for people to update others on the little stuff that happen in their daily lives. E.g. I need to pee. Yes, I thought the whole idea was ridiculous.

Nevertheless, I got hooked. I did try psycho-ing a few of my friends to join Twitter so we can follower each other and make Twitter interesting but it kind of backfired though some of them did try for a few days. Luckily, my classmates have Twitter accounts then, so it was an instant hit for me.

Then one day, I saw a baby bat lying on the road in broad daylight (I don’t know if it was dead) and I badly wanted to Tweet about it. It kind of tweaked my heartstrings. It was because of that incident, I decided to join Tweet.sg (no more new sign ups) where I can tweet on the go by sending an text message to a local number and it updates your Twitter account directly. Awesome right?

Maybe you should be more active on your accounts too. Please don’t tweet nonsense and spam your friend’s update list. At least let it be beneficial information for someone out there. There’s so much more about Twitter that I want to say but I’ll leave it to another day. Information overload already.

Wisdom of Crowds

Well, the thing that I’ve learnt and impacted me the most would have to be the Wisdom of Crowds. So what is the Wisdom of Crowds?

The average answer from a group of people is proven to be more accurate than the answer from one expert on that particular subject. Amazing isn’t it?

Here’s a video for you!

I think this is quite true because Viha and Vera carried out an experiment in class. It’s about guessing the number of jellybeans in the jar. Messiah was appointed as the ‘expert’ in the subject, while the rest of us are the people from diverse backgrounds.

So the average of 20 0f our guesses proved to be closer to the number of jellybeans in the jar than what Messiah has guessed. For this to work, there has to be these 4 factors, Diversity of opinion, Independence, Decentralization and Aggregation.

Diversity of opinion – Everyone should have their own set of beliefs and information
Independence – People’s opinions should not be influenced by others around them
Decentralization – Drawing on local knowledge
Aggregation – The average of everyone’s opinion

Wisdom of Crowds is used in several websites that we frequent, namely, Wikipedia and Amazon.

Maybe you should try playing the jellybean game!

Minority Report

Well, I’m not sure if you’ve seen Minority Report because it was released in 2002 and it was directed by Steven Spielberg.

The movie takes place in the year 2054 when criminals are caught even before they commit a crime. This can be done because of the advancement in technology and the use of the 3 psychics. It so happened that one of the psychics predicted that one of the officers in the special unit (Tom Cruise) will commit a murder and he sets out to prove his innocence.

So we watched this movie during NCT tutorial but not the whole movie though, just parts of it. It’s been a long time since I watched a movie in class, the last time was in secondary school I think?

Anyway about the movie, it’s very futuristic, kinda cool and scary at the same time to see how advanced technology can potentially be, based on what I saw e.g. the spider robots,

the cars driving on the sides of buildings and the

advertisements that targeted specifically at the individual just by scanning their eyes.

Will the world really become like this 50 years down the road? I like it the way it is now though, instead of relying fully on technology. I can’t deny that technology has helped us in many ways. One of which is through instant messenger which helps us to communicate with people who are geographically separated from us.

Imagine the cartoon characters on the cereal boxes becoming animated (there’s a part of it in the movie). Wow, then there’ll be more opportunities to advertise and reach out to the target market based on a database of stored user information. Yes, that would also mean, you can be easily tracked down.

Okay, I’m done! Good night!