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.

Nothing much

Life is moving along as usual, nothing really special. I can't believe that it is SMO in less than two weeks and my revision is going badly. I really need to polish up on my Combinatoric and Geometry. My Trigonometry is fail. I think I am going to fail SMO at this rate. Argh.

Considering how little times I went to Npcc, I am really surprised that i am among the few who finished all the CIP hours needed for NYAA.

 

A break, a really short one.

This morning it was still clear when I walked out of my house and the moment I reached the bottom floor, rain started pouring down like mad, and since my umbrella is not really firm, the wind blew it upside down. Then I had to wait for my private school bus in the rain as the shelter was removed due to the need to repair damages. So I got completely drenched. Not a good thing with 2 tests in the day.

This whole week was filled completely with test, projects. I managed to find a 10 min break to type this post. 

I pretty much died for math CCT today. 

-2 for not doing part of the question (jammed)

-1 for the wrong proportion when sketching a graph

-1 for not remembering to take negative value for a square root

-1 for writing the wrong sign

-1 for not combining k<15+2sqrt26>15-2sqrt26 

So I will be lucky to get 24/30 for my CCT which means my math is 79.6% overall (estimate)

I need to be more careful, or I can't imagine what will happen during SMOS.

Just finished English Extensive Reading Program, wrote a bunch of crap and why in the world do we need to make reference to the text when writing a personal narrative after reading one by some random guy?

Inter-house math quiz tomorrow. Alan said he is setting the paper in an attempt to make You Jun fail. I wonder what will happen. When Barry's batch tried to make Ivan fail, he score 23/30 and made 6 careless mistakes. So...

And Napfa is officially over for my class. I was pretty happy with my results of 4A, 1B, 1C. I guess being counted as one year younger really helps a lot. 2.4km walk, the fastest walker in the world can finish this distance in around 9 min 20 sec. (CHAOS project) Maybe we should try walking next time and see how fast we can do so. Walking here is defined as at least one leg with contact with the ground at all times and that leg must be straight.

By the way, do anyone know how to draw the electron configuration for CO which shares a double covalent bond and a coordinate bond?

Tick Tock

Way too busy to update this few days.

National Team Selection test is horrible. I think i got 21 or 22 and the cut off is just 24. Sigh. I guess I have to try harder next year. Hope that Singapore Team can still go to germany as there are 10 confirmed Swine Flu cases there already.

Next week is really busy. Chemistry CCT on Tuesday, Math CCT on Thursday, and Biology practical on Friday. Not to mention the Geography project due next Thursday and English ERP due dunno when. I need to find more spare time.

Got selected for RLP, going to get stuck in school for 2 terms without TV. I am gonna miss all of my documentaries. T.T On the bright side, I will get more time to sleep.

Forgotten

Sigh. Somehow I did not remember to update in 11 days. I guess I was too busy. 

Last Monday:

NAFA! The date they used to record our ages is 1st April, so I am still counted as 14. Then it is the 2.4 km jog/'walk'. My pretest run took me 13min 40sec, which is a really horrible timing, but I guess I was not putting in my best effort. For the actual run, I decided to tag Chen Chen (china scholar) and surprisingly I managed to keep up for the first 6/7 rounds. Then I decided to walk for half of the last round, and my timing is 12min 3sec, which is 3 sec from a B grade. D= I guess I should bring along my watch the next time.

I can't remember anything of interest for the next few days.

Last Friday:

During morning assembly, Ke Yu Xuan was walking around showing people photos of love letters Joseph Kuan sent to Lydia and Aidi. After a bit of inquiry, kyx admitted that he got into joseph's email somehow and sent the letters. This is really not nice, and I made a mental note never to let kyx get into my email. XD

Then the physic test was horrible. There are 3 questions and I made 3 silly mistakes. I got 1000 on my calculator, which is in cm, so I should have converted to 10m and somehow, I decided to write down 5. I wonder what I am thinking back then. 

On the way back from the Phy lab, we saw these people from china, and one of them is supposedly the person in-charge of the education system in china. 教育部长。 Then the school had to round off certain corridors, making it really annoying trying to get back to class.

Soon after came the English teacher. She gave out a handful of handouts, and asked us to read this little quotation on one of the pages. 

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EL Teacher: You Jun, what is your take on this?

You Jun to Jun Jie: Which page is it?

EL Teacher: Why you always so inattentive in class? Every time need rely on Jun Jie.

Jun Jie: Not really, and he is the first in singapore math olympiad last year.

EL Teacher: No wonder he is like that.

Class: (laugh)

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I guess I should not be evil, but that was really random and funny to see You Jun get suanned.

 

Class decoration judging was friday after school, so as usual, we are doing last minute work. Then Arnold got punished to clean the white board and the place that holds the duster. After a frutile attempt to clean it for 15mins, he decided to pour a bucketful of detergent mixed with water onto the board. Then the teacher came in. 

After all of the rubbish we put up (at least it is environmental =D), it is surprising how we got 2nd among all the classes that was judged before us. 

Saturday

It is confirmed that I will be skipping lessons from Tuesday to Thursday to prepare for the IMO team selection test next Friday. I should have been Monday to Thursday, but the person in charge is too busy with the China Officials to bother about us. Either way, I have a 0.1% chance of getting in, so it does not matter. (Not too much, doesn't hurt to try)

This post is freaking long and I guess I should end off with another of Jasper's stupid acts. That day after match support for his class, he ran onto the road and did 10 commando push up and got someone to video it for him. I wonder what's happening to RI boys nowadays.

--We all make our limits, and we set them further out than we have any right.

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.

April the First

I think I forgot to mention in the previous post why the teacher wanted to collect the Chinese CCT papers back for. The average for my class is around 36 to 37, but the level average is 28. Even though there are 7 China scholars in the class, the difference is still to much. I think they will be remarking our scripts in a more strict manner. Hope that I can still get somewhere above 38.5, or else I will never ever get a 4.0 for my chinese GP for the rest of my time in RI. (By the way, my current score is 40.5, but there are also other assignments)

Now back to what happened on April the First. I was sleeping late again on the day before (1am) and when I do this, I always wake up really sleepy. After reaching the classroom at 7.00am, I threw my bag down and took a "short" nap on my table. Since most people in my class has the same habit, the lights are completely off.

Usually, there will be a bell at 7.15am to tell us to go down for morning assembly which starts at 7.25am. However, on that day, it happened that I really fell asleep and no one woke me up. Then after a while, I heard something like "its time to make him up" and when I opened my eyes, the time is 7.25am. There are 4 other guys in the class (i shall not mention names, but 3j guys should know about this), giving this really smug look. I ended up having to run down to morning assembly and ended up getting a pink slip for being late. 

I know that this is not exactly an April's Fool joke, but it just happen to be on that day. I guess I should be sleeping earlier next time.

Then on Wednesday (or thursday?) Qi Hang was whinning in class about probably getting 3.92 for his gpa this term cos he got 3.6 for EL and MEP. A group of us privately agreed to strangle him if he really get that high or even higher. By right, I should not have done that as I am still quite satisfied about my gpa, which falls within an acceptable range. I don't think I should be saying how much or people will decide to strangle me too. (so if you want to know, you will just have to ask me)

On a side note: Jasper took off his shirt today in class again. (and y^2 took a video of it) This is getting really annoying.

Contacts

The emergency relay for my class is a total failure. 

The relay system goes like this:

The chairman (You Jun) receives the information, then he calls the Assist. monitor and me, and each of us is going to call 2 person who will then call one more each. Once the last person receives the call, he will call us back. The whole thing looks like this:

Everything looks so perfect but when we tried, everything just fell apart. 3 hours after You Jun informed me, he call again saying that only one of the 6 columns got the information. 

Deciding that calling everyone myself will be so much easier, I called them and got really weird answers.

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Ding Yue: Alden, did you call Arnold?

Alden: Sorry, I can't reach him.

Ding Yue: Never mind I go call him myself.

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Ding Yue: Arnold, please bring your chinese CCT paper tomorrow.

Arnold: I knew already.

Ding Yue: Who told you?

Arnold: Alden.

Ding Yue: ...

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It seems that everyone one of us live in a really different time and world. (sry about that alden, but there is others like that too.) I guess that the e-group is still a much better way to spread information.

Other than this, today was a really nice day. Teachers should go for training more often, then we get more time to slack at home. (Maybe not, I managed to catch up with my sleep though.)