A new term, a new beginning

Can't believe that holidays are over already. I hardly gotten any rest to recharge myself for the new term. >.<

I had only 2 weekdays to myself all thanks to my wonderful cca that took up 8 days of my life and I absolutely see no point in going down there for a few hours a week running around doing stupid drill to train discipline. Not as if I will not get enough during NS. Either way, due to the open nature of this blog, I shall refrain from entering further complaints regarding my cca.

Regarding homework, I only did the bare minimum that will allow me to go through Day 1 with any annoyed looks from teachers. So I have to clear the rest during the next 4 days. It is a good thing that all CCA will be cancelled for this week due to H1N1. And since I am not here for week 2, so I will be missing quite a bit of training.

Nevertheless, this holiday is highly productive in terms of math training with me popping down to NUS for 4 whole days and spending 2 whole days whacking questions at home. I hope that my simo career will NOT be the following: Junior--Senior--Nat Training--Senior. Time to look through all past training notes again. If I have time that is. Haiz.

I will be flying off to Durban, South Africa next week. Can anyone tell me who is going from the rgs side? We need to agree on something to do for the cultural presentation.

SIMO Camp =D

SIMO Camp ROX! This years camp is much nicer than I expected it to be considering the field under renovation and the no movements to other block after 11pm rule.

Day 1: I think I arrived at 7.50am and to my surprise, I was among the last. After checking in, I was playing 围棋 with Alan on a 19x19 board he brought along. He let me 8 moves and I think I only won slightly over one third of the board. Not too bad for a beginner I suppose. =P For those that read Alan's blog, you should know what happened when we reported 20 minutes late.

The first Ice Breaker game works like this: there is a triangle with incircle, circumcircle, and the 3 excircles. Each line/curve have its own description and everyone must find someone that fits a few of the description and put their name on the intersection of the respective lines. There is obviously a GREAT display of teamwork where people just went around and started copying each other's answers. Apparently, someone gave the wrong information and more than half of us got it wrong. Then there are the blanket game and werewolf, another advance version of polar bear/mafia.

The night was fun. Since Ziyang is not here the first day, Keven and Zhan Xiong decided to move over. 5 person in 2 rooms for 4 seems just a little bit cosy. Night time card/五子棋 games where fun though. =D

Day 2: The training is nothing special.

We finally found a place to play soccer! It is the semicircle area beside the field where only around 20 at most can play at once. Since that day is the X-men sharing night, we split the team as X-men vs the rest. The score is 6-6 when there are only 4 left on each side. So we made it the last goal and winner takes all. (duh.) Sadly, Barry, Ivan, Ziyang and me lost as Mr Lu score the goal scraping the left bar of the goalpost.

Day 3: Vertical training was pretty much okay except that the range of questions are horrible. There are 6 obvious and 3 more obvious (for ivan and some of the rest). Question 10 is a killer. I think Alan's group got a few point by a solution using complex vector? (Alan, can clarify?)

Amazing race was scary. We are suppose to get 8 number/letter and if you move them 7 letters back, you should get quod erat and it is supposed to be part of Q.E.D with demonstrandum as the final answer.

Back in my room, I released that I got a blister on my toe the size of my toe. With the skin torn. Ouch. Same seemed to have happened to Keven.

Day 4: Nothing much. Except that I failed my quiz completely. I did not notice 2 holes in 2 of my solutions and that resulted in a 1 for both. Whoops. I really need to be much much more careful next time. (there are 3 questions per day, on day 4 and day 5)

Day 5: Basically the same as day 4 except that dinner was at a restaurant. Just happen that the food is worth $15 per person.

NITE5: I shall save the details for a later date when I am more free, but truly, it is the best night I had in SIMO camp. Including the one from last year.

Training!

I feel really sleepy after the 2 day of intensive training on tuesday (7.30am to 6.30pm) and wednesday (7.30am to 3.15pm). 

I managed to solve 3 combinatoric questions, 1 geometry questions, and none for inequalities. I think I can solve at least 2 inequality questions, but since the Ivan solved nearly every single one first, I just listened to the solutions.

For the 'Final Sprint' of mixed questions, I solved 1 number theory and 1 random question (i think it is combinatoric). Its not too bad, considering that most people solved that much with the exception of Ivan (>17 in total), Barry and Jia Han. 

Then I went off for my classification shoot for NPcc today. Surprisingly I score 75/80 for my first try. I think I should have gotten full marks, as two of the bullet holes are overlapping by around 50% and that guy insisted that it is only 1 hole. Sigh. Since 75 can rank me 2nd in my squad, I don't think that shot matters much now.

Biology Practical Test tmr. Hope I don't forget something important.

And I almost forgot something. Malaysian Montage for RI sec 2 (T2W10) should be cancelled due to the Swine Flu. I have no idea about the reliability of the source, but if its true, Mr Kwa will be happy as the sec 2 can now study for SMO. Hopefully that singapore will not pull out of IMO this year as there are already 2 suspected cases in germany.

Physic Comix!

This week passed by uneventfully, with almost nothing happening "yet", so I have absolutely no idea what to post about. But since I came past this comic when surfring the website, I guess I will just post this up.

Link: http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/nerd_sniping.png

I died for my math TA. Remembering a wrong formula proves to be disastrous during math tests, and even though it can still be used to find the answer, there is always never enough time to do so.

SMP is crazy. We have been working in the lab for 2 to 3 months and now they tell us that we need to watch a safety video before going in again. There are 5 parts of length 4o min, 110 min, 50 min, 50 min and 50 min. I think you guys can do the sum for yourself. But having seen 30% of the video, and 30% is common sense, and the rest being irrelevant to my project, we decided to speed things up "a bit". But in the end, I still missed my CCA today. For those who know my core cca, you should know what I think of that.

NAFA pretest tomorrow. Still wondering whether I am counted as 14 or 15. I hope it is 14, then I don't need to do pull-ups. I can do 4 at max. I think that is a D or a C.

11 April

Now I really got a Black Forest cake =D. So the cake is not a lie after all. Many thanks to all those who wished me happy birthday today.

Now I have no CEC badge. The company misprinted the colour for Treasure and Monitor, so they are going to collect the old badges and give us the new ones on monday. Should have taken a photo of the old one, it is one of a kind after all. Sigh.

Die Chaos, DIE !! I finally finished it at last. Hope that I will get a reasonable score. >.< To the rest doing Physic Chaos from RI, please remember to refer to the Teacher's Comments and make relevant changes, or you shall all DIE HORRIBLY (I hope that Nathaniel does not see this or I am going to get poked again =P)

Coordinate Geometry is crap. Today's Simo Nat Team training at NUS is crap. And I hope that I remember to bring the camp form next week. The National Team selection is on 1st May and 2nd May. Why do we never get to rest during holidays? 

For the Senior Take Home test, I did 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8 which is only one more question than last time. Thinking about 10. I heard that answer to 2 can be found in this year's Senior training notes, but since I dun have them, I guess I will be getting another headache. Argh.

After doing the senior 2008 paper (section 1) I got like 29. Still one point away from what Mr. Kwa wants. I guess I fail my life again. Time to do more practice paper tomorrow. My life is sad. But math being math, was fun, is fun and shall always be.

Hcl 4.0, Sayonara

光阴似箭、日月如梭。 To think that is was a whole one week since I last updated. Nothing really interesting happened, it took real long to get enough things to type this post. I don't like fillers.

For chinese, my CCT score drop from 40.5 to 39.5. I only got 78% for daily work, I thought I will get higher, so my over all grade dropped from 79.3 (rounded up to 80) to 78.4 (rounded up to 79). Everyone lost 1 to 3 marks and there happens to be 7 people who got 79% in my class >.<  Just as I said, this will be the closest I will get to a 4.0 for chinese for 2009. Sigh.

English was not much better off either. D'cruz gave me 18/25 at first, which is bare 70% when combined with my other assignments. However, she realised that she gave everyone 2 marks for a 1 mark question, which is completely crapped up, so I got 17/25 which is a 68% overall. So I failed my life once again.

The other subjects are not too bad, considering getting 84% for geography, which happen to be the highest grade. I guess that the teacher like my face. (that was just a random comment)

Now for math. The APMO score was released last saturday and I got 6. Looking at the section for marks, I can see 3 other pencil marks which includes 3, 4, 7. I wonder how many markings did they go through?

Then the selection for IWYMIC is over and waiting for Mr Kwa to officially announce the results after confirming how many people can the school sent. He is trying to get an extra team, but the organisers had dao him for 2 month? 

Here are the current rankings that he disclosed to You Jun and me.

Rankings:

1 You Jun

2 me =D

3 Ryan Kor

4 Joseph Kuan (tentative)

5 KYX (tentative)

6 Sheng Han/Yan Qi  (tentative)

The senior team take home test this year is surprisingly hard (many thanks to those who sent me the paper =D) I managed to find the solutions to 1, 3, 4, 6, 8. That is not too bad I guess. I would like to point out that there can be two interpretations to question 8. The easy one will make the question extremely obvious, while the other will make it ultra-obvious to Ivan and Ivan only. The trainers are not counted and maybe Jiahan too, but that line "so obvious", "common sense" belong to Ivan. I dun want to explain it here, it will take too long, so please look for me on saturday, sms me, etc.

Question 2 is the shortest one, yet it seems so hard D:, tried Fermat's Little Theorem, but to no avail. I guess I should be revising my math TA tomorrow, it is not a easy topic, not at all.

Then saturday is really a special day(for me). I hope that I will get a blackforest cake this saturday. (reference to Portal, just wiki it to find out)

On a side note, good luck to everyone going for SYF.