The Highlands Stay

The journey begins with the coach ride just after day breaks on 22nd Dec 2007. After a very long ride, with breaks in between, we've finally reach the highland resort. This wasn't a trip that I was particularly keen to go, but whatever, since I'll be rotting away at home if I didn't go.

Anyway, this is the first time I go since I've turned 21, meaning I'm eligible to enter the casino. I didn't know what to expect but at least I know that the officer standing guard at the entrance will surely want to see my identity card, so it's always prepared before I enter the premise.

It wasn't at all an interesting place. During my stay there, I lost about 200RM at the slots machine. But luckily, they're not my money, so I don't feel the pinch. The air inside was very bad too. Smokers were allowed to smoke within the premise, and with the smoke all trapped in an enclosed place, the stench was really bad.


The air outside weren't any better. Even though I see no smoking signs at the shopping complex, the rule weren't strictly enforced. So many people were happily walking around and smoking polluting the air inside. Why are these people so inconsiderate..

The bowling alley didn't liked me either. I played terribly and washed the gutter so many times, making me get half my usual average score. So embarassing..

I didn't play much at the outdoor theme park though I had the whole day ticket. Since I weren't the adventurous type, I didn't like to take these type of joy rides. Therefore, I only went for some of the milder rides and pass on those that are too extremely for me. The queues were very long too, and was pretty much a waste of time.

Let's hope Kai will be able to plan a decent highlands stay in the next summer vacation or will we be going at all?

forest fire!!

Coming back to earth

After a 4-day trip to the Genting Highlands Resort, it's time to come back down with the examination results today.

The third sem was kinda in a rush for me. Tutorials, projects, assignments, etc. really give me little time for games throughout the semester. Though usually still have time for dota every night, I kinda reduce my gaming time by half.

The result was somewhat lower than what i expected, but there was still improvement from the past year, so well, I just have to be glad. The 2 papers in my first day of examination were the worst. This should really not happen since I have ample time for the revision during the study break.

The third paper was fine. Electrical Engine module, yucky to so many people, but it seems easy to me during the paper, and I'm glad I can say that the paper was indeed easy.

The next 3 papers came in the space of 2 days, which give me little time for the last paper, but probably the group assignment helped abit with my grades, saving me from a 3rd C for the semester. The other 2 papers fell below expectation, the pigeons must have eaten up the seeds in the magic garden.

Merry X'mas

Keep this short, Merry Christmas Everyone!!

Ugh, the boredom

This past week was the most boring it can get during the holidays. First, it's been raining almost everyday, meaning outdoor activities are no, no. Second, the ff disc doesn't work, but since I'm bent on completing the game this time round, I dug out the PS set and started playing again!! Third, my msn has been exceptionally quiet this week for some very good reason..

So in the end, all the wet-weather programs are utilised:
1) Anime watching, completing some 30 plus episodes from animes like prince of tennis, happiness!, and some childish anime. ;p;

2) Chauffeuring my mum and her friend to lunch.

3) Playing of games that I've played in secondary school. Retro is the 'in' thing nowadays. Keep watching channel 8 and you will know..

4) Rainy days means no outdoor activities like swimming and basketball, but there's always the dry version of swimming.

5) Watching the puppy play with his uncle, but his uncle is just not in the mood for that:

Get off me, little one!!

10 Days Countdown to Judgement Day

Judgement day is near, how i wonder the judges ever finish the judging in time. Especially the GEM judge, he's such a slowpoke when it comes to doing this, passing the mid-term judgement only after the final judgement is over.

Here's some skills attained from the past semester:

1) Ask a counter-question when people ask you a question that you do not know how to answer.
2) Q.E.D. Quo Erat Demonstrandum, is put at the end of a mathematical proof or philosophical argument.
3) The world will come to an end when the monk complete the moving of a Tower of Hanoi of 64 disks.
4) The art of Book-making.
5) Some training for line-laying before the ICT in 6 months time.
6) Making arguments that sounds logical but are simply wrong.
7) Making inferences from others' words without them having to spell it out.

Final Fantasy

When you talk about the FF series, the first one that really become a hit is FFVII. And now 10 years after the game is out, I once again took out the PC-CD rom version and installed in my PC. Way to go, at least it still works fine.

Playing from scratch again, I got a totally new experience. There's no lag like the first time I played on my PC. Haha, this is of course true, since the performance of computer increases at an exponential rate. Then I was running on minimum requirement for the game - the 32mb ram; now, 1gb..

As the game progresses, I reaches the first mini-game in the game. The bike game, where you have to prevent the enemy bikes from hitting the truck of the allies. With the improve in computer specification, I made a mess of the game and my allies got K.O. in 1 hit by the boss after the mini-game. The game was simply too fast for me to control the movement of my bike and attacks that I cannot protect my allies from harm of the enemies. This reminds me of my first programming lecturer's experience with pacman during the transition from MS-DOS to Windows (or something like that). He said the pacman simply just move so fast from one end of the board to another and there's no way to control it.

Time to leave the sad land of Midgar in search of Sephiroth. I put in extra effort in training my team getting them to learn all their limit breaks, stealing more weapons from monsters that appeared to sell. From my level at this point of the game, all the bosses were going to be a breeze. Having 1 or 2 of the teammates breaking their limits will do the trick.

Fighting on, I finally reach game land - Gold Saucer in Corel. Yay, my favourite part of the game, there's so many things to play here. Winning items in Speed Square, taking a trip round the playground in a skytrain in Round Square, resting at the ghost inn in Ghost Square, playing in the game arcade at Wonder Square, and the best of all, racing chocobos in Chocobo Square. But I can't take part in the race just yet, need to get the game to progress a little more.

Let's get the race started!! I simply wipe out Dyne, the boss, and ex-friend of Barret, leader of the 'terrorist' group, Avalanche, with a simple shot of Barret's level 3 limit break. Yahoo... Chocobo racing (racing music plays)...........

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What Anti-climax....

Woohoo..

Great, just one morning and my old bones are aching. Been a while since I played badminton, and the last time I played was not coincidently the last time when Ben was back. My skills have deteriorate, really need to brush up abit if I were to challenge ah Bee now. He's been secretly in training.

Next is to decide which I should play this wkend, soccer or basketball.. Either way, gotta bang seh some pple.

Days of Wandering starts again

Oh yeah, 1 wk of the holidays have passed, but it seems so boring everyday with nothing much to do. Time to start wandering around the neighbourhood again. Hope the rain goes away soon, then I'll wander further. Hope to buy a bike soon, then I'll wander even further.

Margin of 4-D

The margin for a bet on an event is

1-(bet odds)/(occurrence odds)

which will lie in the interval [0,1]; it is typically expressed as a percentage. This percentage shows that if you bet a large number of times, u can expect to be losing that percentage of the cumulative wager.

I shall now try to find a rough estimation for the margin for 4-D for a 1-dollar big bet. This is certainly flawed, since the winning numbers can be repeated.

let's calculate a weighted average of the bet odds. If i'm not wrong, the odds for the prizes are as follows for a 1-big bet:

consolation - 60,
starter - 250,
3rd - 500,
2nd - 1000,
1st - 2000

Therefore the weighted average for the betting odds will be:
{[(60+250) x 10 + 500 + 1000 + 2000] / 23} = 6600/23

Obviously, the occurence odds will be 10000/23.

Margin = 1 - (6600/23)/(10000/23) = 1 - 0.660 = 0.340 = 34.0%

You can conclude that you lose about 34.0% of the total wager you ever betted. Imagine the amount of money the bookmakers are earning...

What Exams are all about?

Exams, to me can be summarized using one word: CRAP!

Throughout the previous 2 weeks, what I have been writting in my papers are mostly crappy things. When the question is not in the MCQ format and I don't know the answer, I'll just anyhow write something totally without any basis. Just like the way I did my tutorials, which I was lucky enough to get one of them correct. But I guess this sort of things won't happen in this exam.

The first two papers were disasterous and they had to fall on the same day. Operating systems and probability, and I almost had the urge to hand in a blank answer sheet. But it's always still better to have something written, since Pr(score pt) = 0, when the answer is blank, and Pr(score pt) > 0, when the answer is not blank. Judging from how the probability mid-term test was marked, I just have to pray hard that the marker will be more lenient this time.

The third paper was surprisingly the easier paper. Whenever someone ask me what modules I was taking, they would be really shocked to hear that I was taking this module and asked me why i would wanna torture myself by taking an EE module. Perhaps the reason I take this module was that it has really got nothing to do with physics. So it was quite fun taking this course. Recommended if you haven't taken it - EE2006.

The fourth paper was the crappiest. The tutorials were easy (mistaken by Mr. Godlike as primary school maths), but the paper was much tougher. On top of that, after thinking through some parts of it, I found I might have committed some silly mistakes in my counting.

The fifth and sixth paper were on the same day too. The fifth was the morning paper on my GEM. The paper was very straightforward as some parts requires simple calculations, while others you just have to crap your way through. I finished around after 1.25hr, but stayed through the paper's duration as I still had a long break before the final paper. Towards the end, about half the hall was empty.

Soon after the fifth paper, I started my revision for my last paper, and I really mean start. Haven't revised that module at all, since the mid-term test. But given that this was the finale, I really don't have the mood to read. In the end, I managed to finish browsing through the tutorials and understand some concept, which really did come in handy. 30 MCQs, 4 structured. The 4 structured qns are just variations of the tutorial question, but I only managed to do 2 of them, seems like I'm goner for this module too. And from the MCQ section, I had to use this formula at least half the time: CEIL(RANDOM x N), where RANDOM is a function of the calculator that returns a psuedo-random value from 0,1 inclusive, and N is the number of choices the MCQ has. Hope I can get lucky.

Finally, I shall end this very long post with a question from the fourth paper, which I still cannot solve now:

A Professor in the secondary school of magic claims that if he were to plant 5 seeds in an equilateral triangle plot of land of sides 1m, at least 2 of the seeds will be less than 0.5m of each other. Use the pigeonhole principle to show that his claim is correct.

If this helps:

Pigeonhole principle says, if there are more pigeons than the number of pigeonholes, then at least 2 of the pigeons must come from the same hole.

I can't really imagine how can seeds be related to the pigeonhole principle, won't the pigeon just eat up the seeds?