Month: March 2006

I sent this to myself a few months back through futureme.org:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!
aha this is dumb, but anyway, hope you’re doing fine Colin!
Hope that your A Level results were great, and PRAISE GOD!

NS coming, or has it started? Remember to serve God always.

Hope that you ain’t that lonely at this point of time.

This email was sent on the friday before your A Levels. Haha.

Haha.

For Cosiety:

Okay, we all know that Singapore is, in fact, a tiny dot on the world map. But do you ever feel why it sometimes seems like a million years to travel from one place to another? The island is supposed to be small, yet it takes ages to travel around. Well, maybe there’s some form of hidden conspiracy going on to make Singapore seem large to tourists and locals alike.

1. The urban planners decided to put large obstacles at the wrong places
For some reason or the other, they decided to place most of the reservoirs in this place called the “Central Catchment Area”. As its name suggests, the reservoirs are right smack in the middle of the island. Hence, even though Ang Mo Kio and Choa Chu Kang are beside each other, you have to go around all the forests surrounding the lakes to get from one side to another. No, there’s no through road. Perhaps some great explorer can try cutting through it and break a record in Singapore.

2. Very important educational institutions are built at far away places
Maybe there’s some mutual agreement that the two main universities have to be in the west of the island, so that all those smart people staying in the east must travel long country roads to the other side. Besides, I think there is also an agreement for most of the JCs to be concentrated on the east area, so that we can have “interstate transition” to live another “state” when we go to university. Hmm, it seems that they decided to place ITE College East in the east too (duh), to make use of that pan-island thing.

(Isn’t it funny how I take a bus from my house to VJC, and I see people on the same bus from another JC on the same long journey as me, but these people are going home…)

3. More important places are stuck at a corner
Changi Airport is at the eastern-most corner, Jurong Island is at the western corner, the causeway is at the northern corner, while the CBD is at the southern corner. Enough said. Sometimes I wonder if tourists wonder why the journey along the ECP takes so long to reach their hotel when Singapore is just a small island. I suppose they have not realised how big we are.

4. Bus companies love to lengthen bus routes
Did you ever wonder why the bus has to turn one big freaking round the whole town before getting out of the town and finally proceeding to your destination? Why does that bus have to turn a loop round Tampines before going to Bedok? Why does 74 have to turn a circle in Hougang before going to Ang Mo Kio? Hmm…Singapore is big, so must turn rounds to serve more people. Heh. And oh, then the bus fares collected from people can be higher too…

5. Congestions are common
Eunos is notorious for traffic jamming day and night. The CTE jams like nobody’s business. Even our humble Marine Parade Road sometimes gets congested in the morning with a lot of cars going to the different schools. Now you know why journeys sometimes take forever.

6. Electoral boundaries enlarge “towns”.
Ever wondered why you stay in Serangoon, yet it says “Welcome to Marine Parade Town”. Or those who stay in Hougang, it’s “Aljunied Town”. These “states” of Singapore seem to enlarge the concept of a town. On one hand, you are in Marine Parade, yet actually you are in Serangoon! Wow, Singapore is big.

7. Distance = Speed x Time
Sometimes, our buses like to crawl on the bus lane as if the driver owns it, even though the traffic is clear in front. And because how big Singapore is, many people are often late for work, and whenever there is an outing, somehow at least one of your friends will be late. Also, often people are seen chasing and running for the train (or bus) as if the world is going to end soon.

We should start promoting ourselves as Uniquely Big Yet Small.

(On another note, one of the early colonial plans of Singapore was to have a circle road surrounding the central area, with little roads to all the towns around. Imagine that happened. We have to travel circles to travel from one side to the other…)

So yesterday was the day. The day of truth. We’ve been waiting for months and weeks and hours, predicted the date and day and time. And now here it comes.

Went to school early morning, just like any other school day, just that I was in normal clothes instead of school uniform. Hence I felt weird. Looked for Mr. Dom Chua and show him the victorillabong posters I printed. Then we went for assembly. Ah, my first national anthem for the year 2006. lol

Mr. Dom Chua and I went to see Mr. Gi and walked to the General Office, and Ms Tan passed the huge bag of result slips to Mdm Teo who brought them into Mrs Chan office, while a group of teachers queued up to peek at the results…

After that, I had breakfast with wx. Praise the Lord for he was saved recently. Then we visited the students lounge, so cool and nice and comfy. After that, the interesting moment came…mr. chua was in the general office looking at the results, and he told me josh p’s and my results over the phone. WOW! I couldn’t believe what he said. I’m very surprised. God is awesome! He has done it again and has blessed me tremendously.

After that, Mr. Gi asked me to touch up the template for the printed statistics board that they’ve been using for the past 3-4 years. haha, changed the font and colours a bit. Then saw mr. gi again who had the excel file of the whole school’s results! had a glance at a few of my friends and told them through sms. some of them did not do very well though. And I doubled checked my results cos I still could not believe it… (Tip: if you wish to know your results early, come to school early! haha though it may be quite anti-climatic…)

It was time and Mr. Chua, Mr. Ng K G and I decided to set up the cosiety booth to allow current Victorians and year 3s alike to sign well wishes for their peers and seniors. we brought 2 projectors, a few tablet pcs and laptops for showcase of cosiety website. main purpose was to promote cosiety. chay him and a few subjectif j1s were there too. Supposed have lunch at McDonald’s with my class but in the end it was cancelled. Luckily I didn’t walk to ECP early. But darn, my class is so hopeless. In the end, I ate with Ivan and John with good old canteen food.

As time went by, more year 3s came, in multi-coloured hair, variety of clothes and stuff. Many in NS looked different without hair. hahaa. my time will come… Ivan did his cosiety badge thing again…haa so funny. tried to get some people I know to sign the Tablet PC, like zhanhui, victor, lihui, ashish etc. some people refused as they say they didn’t have the mood as they were too anxious…as expected. As usual, it comes to show that I don’t have that many people to interact with at that point of time when everyone was catching up with their friends. Later the “long-wu-bang” was posted up and some people congratulated me for my 4As, A2 and merit. (I thought I would get one or two Bs for Physics and Econs, and maybe B for GP, but God is great and faithful! I’m really grateful for my results given my prelim grades. I always thought 4As was impossible for me and I’m never that good enough to get that. But it’s a miracle.)

Then, time to go to hall. Everyone settled down and Mrs Chan gave the speech and statistics, and also gave result slips to the top students, including ashish and lixin. then we collected our stuff from mrs koh while I took photos of every one. The day ended off pretty anti-climax-ly, with no Victorian anthem sang (vjc mah), no class outing. only went out with ashish, mao, wx and kameng for dinner, and later meeting joel l. and josh p for further dinner and dessert (lol). haix, told you my class is pretty hopeless.

—

This marks the closing of the JC chapter of our lives. As I mentioned, we still made it in the end. By the grace of God, I outperformed my expectations of AABB. After all those complains of JC life and studies and stuff 2 years ago, and thoughts of going to poly, I’ve graduated from it, been there and done that. Those don’t matter anymore now, do they? All the stress, PW, whining, ranting, grumbling, ponning, flirting, eating, sleeping (or the lack of), PEing, Mass dancing, CCAing, iComping are over. And they have been justified. (Haha juniors, you’re still stuck in the system =p) Perhaps God meant well for me to go JC, now that I am going to university. In any case, I won’t in anywhere by chance.

Probably one of things I regretted about JC life is that I did not make enough friends to hang out with. As I mentioned, my class is pretty hopeless, though I could have made a better effort to make friends with more people in and out of class. iComp is there but not really what I expected. I gave more than I took back. It’s not that I don’t have friends. More like I don’t have enough close friends, close enough that we always go out together often. The result of this is that my life is pretty boring now, not many people to celebrate with -_-

Well anyway, now is decision-making time. okay, supposed to celebrate first, but no people to celebrate with. I don’t like to be the organiser, prefer to be asked. haha. Decision-making…my initial plan was to apply for MDA and go study near hillsong. haha. but now it seems that my results are good and people say I should try US/UK. But these are so far away and application procedures are more complicated and Australia’s. So I don’t know. Another problem is the choice of course. I want to study media-related but sometimes there are quite a number of these. I also don’t know which universities are good in media/design/IT courses. No point going to an overseas uni which is lousier at these courses than NTU right? God please guide me in my decisions.

Sometimes I think God has a sense of humour. This is a story of the number 13: Yesterday’s date was 1-3. My position on the students getting 4As list in VJC is 130. My O Level index number was 0138. I was born on 11-3. I was saved on 13th dec.

Okay this is a bit overdue…but anyway…

Went to AA 2006 with Joshua P, Chris, Dyl, Jeremy C, Jon. I reached at 9.45am but we only set off from pasir ris at 11am! lol everyone came late..as usual. While on the bus, there was a jam near Changi V, on the biggest road block where every vehicle had to go under a shelter to be checked. I thought there were X-Ray machines, like those at immigration checkpoints, but they only checked the underside and walked up our bus.

At about 11.30am, the flight show started while we were still on the bus. We climbep to the upper deck to try to see some things. A pretty interesting exhibition, though it was a super hot day. And a very far away place too…after a long journey, a snail’s crawl through the one-lane road, a U-turn at Changi Airport Cargo Terminal entrance, more crawls along the road and I finally arrived, and the airshow was already on.
It was very crowded, the military planes did stunts, vertical ascents, 360-degrees and more. everyone woo-ed wah-ed and cheered when the Airbus A380, the largest passenger aircraft in the world, flew past in a few fighter-jet-like manoeuvres. Singapore Airlines is the first to fly it. How cool is that?

After the airshow, we walked around. It’s weird to see all the flags at full mast while the Singapore flag at half mast due to the death of our ex-DPM. The indoor tradeshow exhibits were not very interesting, pretty quiet since most of the exhibitors left, and nothing much to see. Though there were many halls and many many booths.

The main attraction is the outdoor static aircraft displays. The smaller area were the smaller planes and fighter planes. We had a super long queue to board the bus to the runway area to view the larger aircraft like the A380. The queue moved pretty fast though…while me and josh grabbed lunch for the others. it was very hot. and louis n weiyi had the guts to come and cut queue right in front of the security guard. lol

We took the cute airport bus which you only get onboard for such occasions and when your flight does not have a place to park in changi airport (which is rare I guess). Then we reached an area nearer to the main runways of the airport and saw the bigger planes like B-1B Lancer, A380 etc. When I walked here, I thought people were queuing behind to board the A380 and see its inside. But too bad I found out later that we can only watch it from a distance…

All in all, we spent quite a few hours in there. and got roasted and burnt and left at about 5pm to Joy Link. It was alright, not bad to see yet not totally worth the $21 but I think it sure did for Jeremy C. who koped so many flight magazines and stuff. haha. no more asian aerospace but changi aerospace next year. so weird. heard the exhibitor couldn’t agree with the sg gahmen or something.