Holiday’s Almost Over

*Blog update for Thursday, 14/6/07*

Again, I’m one day late in posting my blog post for the same reason – Momma using Internet…Damn it, I shall now update my blog in the remaining days here during the day instead of fighting it out wit Mom at night.

Anyway, here it is:

I just realised I don’t have much time to study once I’m back in Singapore. I’ll be heading down south this coming Wednesday and after that I have 4 more days to go before the start of exams. And cut 1 day off because I’m meeting my orientation group friends for some gathering.

This leaves me with Friday, Monday and Tuesday to finish up studying most of my subjects. Don’t count the weekend cause it’s my out days. And I’ve got lotsa things to catch up. Crappo.

I hate exams, never liked it. But crap, I’m stuck here going through the education system. I’ll write more about it in some later posts why exams are a piece of junk.

Damn it man, although I have a 1 month holiday break, it’s not really holiday. It’s more like a study break. Reason? 1st week I had Alpha Bravo Camp aka [tag]AB Camp[/tag] – a leadership camp supposedly to groom leaders of my college (but in my humblest opinion have not achieved its objectives)…

Then we had make-up lectures for Maths and Econs during holidays. Luckily my co-curricular group does not have any extra practises during holidays…Choir had practices like almost everyday during the holidays.

And then we had to do self-directed learning for one chapter in Physics. We have to download an e-module from the school website and study it. It is a video consisting of lecture slides with a background lecturer’s voice. I did my lecture yesterday and took up more than 1 hour of my time.

As I said earlier, exams are after holidays, so this holiday (ermm…study break) I have to brush up on my studies….and it’s almost over…Should exams be after holidays or should it be before holidays? Which is better? Another post for some other days….

Trip to KL

*Blog update for Tuesday, 12th June 07*

This was supposed to be a blog post for yesterday, but I couldn’t post it up because Mom was using the internet.

Anyway, yesterday, Wen Pin aka Bryan See and me went jalan-jalan to downtown KL. And this feels so weird. We call ourselves KL boys (ok Klang Valley if you are that particular, but I was born in KL though) but haven’t really roamed the streets of KL.

Not as though we haven’t really walked around KL before in our life, but we hardly do it. I guess it’s the same for most of us Klang Valley kids. We tell foreigners we come from KL, but how many times have we visited (or ever visited) our national landmarks aka places of interests like the Tugu Negara, National Library, Dataran Merdeka etc? We always go to the shopping malls, but shopping malls are just shopping malls and shopping malls are almost identical all over the world; nothing so special.

Anyway, the two of us went down by bus (another KL thingie, how many of you KL-ites actually use public buses?) to [tag]Central Market[/tag]. We had this ‘[tag]Eat and Sleep[/tag]’ brand that we want to promote and we are thinking of producing some T-shirts for sale. Thinking that Central Market being the hive of all artistes, there will be cut-throat competition; hence prices of custom made T-shirts will be much cheaper.

But we are proven wrong. The prices of T-shirts are much expensive than our current supplier. I sense some monopolistic or agreement sort of thing between the sellers there. And I’m not wrong. One shopkeeper actually told us he didn’t want to go below a certain price because he didn’t want to ‘spoil’ the market.

By the way, Bryan had already made an initial supply of ‘Eat and Sleep’ T-shirts of 20 pieces and sales had been brisk. I like the ‘Eat and Sleep’ branding and foresee a big potential here. I sell my idea of marketing this brand to Bryan and he seems interested. I’m writing a business plan for this venture and hopefully this venture will be a successful one after the failed 69Tribe plan.

More details about this venture soon. I’ll keep all of you updated on the new T-shirt designs once it’s out.

Now, once we are done with Central Market, we made our way to [tag]Petaling Street[/tag]. We didn’t know it was walking distance till we saw some signboards. We were also within walking distance of [tag]Dataran Merdeka[/tag], but we chose to head right towards Petaling Street instead of Dataran Merdeka. I guess that’s a blessing in disguise cause if we had headed to Dataran Merdeka, we would have seen the mess that KL was in after the flash floods 2 days back. The Dataran Merdeka carpark was still flooded as of yesterday and it will definitely be a sight if we had gone there.

We walked around Petaling Street in the afternoon, but it’s quite empty and quiet. Perhaps it’s much more vibrant at night. By the way, it’s KL’s Chinatown right? But I see many shopkeepers being foreigners. Ironic. Anyway, we didn’t buy anything, just thought it would be nice to roam around.

Oh yeah, and another observation. We saw some DBKL council officers walking around Petaling Street. And it stopped at the Rolex watch shop….Hahaha….can’t stop smiling at the sight of corruption that might just be happening right under our noses.

And the weird part is, there are 2 police stations within walking distance of Petaling Street. The whole street is selling pirated, fake goods. But the enforcement officers are really turning a blind eye. The traders must have greased the officers with lots of bribes. And I guess they get a free flow of fake goods supply too?

We made our way to [tag]Low Yat Plaza[/tag] next. We found out from the chestnut trader that there’s a monorail near Petaling Street. It’s the Maharajalela station. And Petaling Street is near Stadium Merdeka. Gosh, we are so damn blur about KL’s geography.

We walked around Times Square and both of us agreed that the girls clothing at Times Square are really Lala-ish. And Times Square is really empty especially at the top floors.

We header to Low Yat Plaza next and I bought my mom a Kingston 1GB Flash drive and another 1GB MP3 Player. She gave me some money to buy it. The Flash drive cost me RM35 while the MP3 player RM95.

I was also looking to buy some PC games – Battlefield to be exact. But surprise, surprise….there’s no longer any shops selling pirated CDs openly. I remembered my last trip to Low Yat; CDs were displayed on walls offering all the latest softwares, games, movies. The whole floor that has the CDs seems like it has vanished.

Crap, no more pirated CDs to be bought at Low Yat. On second thought, I remembered some small shops displaying movie VCDs/DVDs….And not as openly as last time….Perhaps some enforcement was done recently? Or not enough bribe offered? Or a change in the police head? Never know the reasons…..

Oh and lastly, sorry no pixs over here. Scared to bring down camera phone to KL….Scared kena rompak…

Reminiscence

You can never buy back past time. As I strolled around my old secondary school – SMK Batu Lapan (8th Mile High School), I rekindled the time that I used to spend with my classmates and all the crazy things that we used to do during that time. Lots of old memories came back to me and honestly I miss the time spent there.

Yes, I went back to my old secondary school on the first day of re-schooling. Malaysia’s school holidays is only 2 weeks long, but Singapore’s holidays is 4 weeks. So this is probably my only chance to meet up with friends and teachers during school hours for the rest of the year.

I chatted with many teachers and many of them were interested to know how I am doing now in Singapore. Those teachers that I were close with even wanted to know whether I have a girlfriend now in Singapore

Well, I told all of them the same story. Life in Singapore is enjoyable. Except that studies are a little hard especially those involving calculations i.e. Physics and Maths

And many of them asked me about my future plans after A-levels. Tell you the truth, I’m blur. Just told them I’m probably doing Computer Science or Economics….

My Moral teacher just said, well, if all you care about is money, just get into sales…Get into the financial sector…..

And many other teachers I talked with gave some bits of advice here and there….Among the favourites are “Hope you grow up and mature there”, “Don’t be so playful”, “Study hard and don’t give up that opportunity”

Anyway, as I walk past school, I’d realised some things just never change over the course of 5 months since I left school. The dynasty that my friends and I left over is still there for all to see…..

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not me that vandalise the school. It’s a website that my classmates and I started to portray our crazy videos online. It’s some other punks that did it. Anyway, the teachers found out about the website; it created a controversy earlier this year. I took it down and replaced it with my GP blog.

Anyway, for those curious to see how my secondary school looked like, here’s some random pixs.

And for the final pix, this is just plain Batu 8 style – ping pong table…. Haha