Quoteworthy Quotes

The path less trodden is a path rife with treachery, danger and hidden surprises at every turn.

The light at the end of the tunnel may be bright, but the tunnel itself is dark as night, very dark indeed.

Standing vigil by the candlelight for the eventual return of the ship, only to have it delayed yet again, without forewarning or any prior indication.

Tough times demand tougher measures; escape is hardly an option worthy of notable consideration in dire times.

To push the boundaries of endurance, to test the frontiers of tolerance, to tread precariously into the great unknown, such is bravery, yet the intrinsically unique limits must not be forsaken or forgotten.

Reaching for the stars requires more than mere puffery and sweet talk to cajole a nova to descend from the heavens; solid action must be taken to wrench the wretched celestial entity from its perch in the inky sky.

An equation will always be balanced by the presence of a constant variable, yet the entire sequence will be thrown into disarray by the incidence of other factors mutually exclusive of the constant variable.

A single tiny ember of flame is all it takes to spark a wildfire razing several acres of evergreen forest.

One slight miscalculation on the captain’s part will result in the demise of the entire vessel into a maelstrom of gargantuan proportions, into the gaping maw of a kraken or onto a bed of razor sharp rocks like a beached whale.

The wheel of fate constantly turns, the engine of destiny relentlessly runs, and the monolith of time persistently surges ahead.

Focus is a double-edged sword. Control and discipline is the key to wielding the weapon as though it was an extension of the arm.

Absolution comes at the cost of dissolution.

Sunlight, however abundant, will expire one day.

Nothing is forever.

Team Players

Team Players

The following is a non-exhaustive list of personality types that characterize an individual’s team performance. Some individuals may be a combination of two or more types. This is only a guide, and individual results may vary upon comparison.

Worker Bee
Description: The best team mate to have in a group. Does his assigned work diligently and seldom with complaints. Submits said work in advance most of the time. Tend to suffer when presenting arguments or doing pitches, which can be circumvented with practice.
Countermeasure: Why do you want to counter such a gem?

Intrepid Hero
Description: Good leadership qualities coupled with good interpersonal skills make this team member an invaluable asset. Will be the liaison between the group and authority, and will take initiative to seek out the best deals for the team. May be overcome with arrogance if not careful.
Countermeasure: Keep him in check, and do not let his own ideas go to his head.

Houdini
Description: Team member who mysteriously vanishes from the face of the earth, usually during crucial times. Unable to reach during said emergencies as all communicative devices and outlets will be severed from the source. Usually reappears in the nick of time or after the deadline.
Countermeasure: Keep track of his movements, and obtain proof of his performance. During critical periods, monitor his activity closer, make him stay with the group to complete his task, or threaten using lethal force. Tie to a leash if necessary.

Drifter
Description: Team member who moves away from the main discussion. Usually goes from the discussed topic to another topic of an alternate interest, like dinner. Severe cases may have multiple occurrences during a single meeting. Drifting is contagious.
Countermeasure: Keep him focused on the task at hand. Silence any semblance of drifting at the first opportunity with authority. Use force when necessary.

Sleeper
Description: Team member who sleeps, literally, at any meeting place under any circumstance. Sleep periods range from a few minutes to multiple hours. During said sleep periods, he is close to impossible to wake up unless sufficient force is applied. Extreme cases may have snoring instances and sleep talking occurrences attached.
Countermeasure: Ensure sleeper has something to do. If he nods off to dreamland, wake him up at the first opportunity. Apply force as needed. Specialised waking tools recommended.

Nocturnal
Description: Team member who frequently hands in assigned work in the wee hours of the morning. Typically turns in work between 1am to 7am, regardless of deadlines or interests of other team members. Can usually be found with numerous excuses for their lateness, citing family issues, health problems or equipment malfunction.
Countermeasure: Force him to submit work before stipulated time, else face dire ramifications. Blackmail if necessary, and keep proof of his lateness for future consideration.

Glutton
Description: Team member who self-imposes a break, usually lunch, on himself and returns hours later. Breaks can range from 2 to 4 hours. Often cites long queues and convenient accidents as excuses. Communication efforts to locate him also curiously come up to a brick wall.
Countermeasure: Attach another team member to follow him for breaks, and have both of them return at a stipulated time. Exercise caution: gluttony is contagious. Bombard with communication efforts or send out a search party if necessary.

Bootlicker
Description: Team member who agrees with everything and anything that is being said, even if the subject matter is totally irrelevant or impractical. Does not seem to possess a mind of his own, let alone opinion. Will change his mind at every turn, or when a new fact that is of general or major consensus appears.
Countermeasure: Shut him up. Seal his vocal canal if necessary.

Opposition Party
Description: Team member who is the opposite of a Bootlicker, and disagrees with anything that the team leader or majority of the team members put forth. Finds fault with everyone at every turn. Can be an utter annoyance. Similar to Bootlickers, he has no mind of his own, although he possesses limited opinion.
Countermeasure: As with Bootlickers, the best way to counter is to shut him up and do not be affected by his words.

Laggard
Description: Team member who is slow to comprehend and understand facts presented during a discussion. Limited sentience present, facts have to be slowly brought across to him in a slow, child-like fashion. Frustration and anger will follow in most cases. Usually performs to standard provided that standard has been thoroughly explained in detail.
Countermeasure: No known countermeasure, explain slowly at the expense of your temper.

Nazi
Description: Team member who refuses to accept any other idea other than his own. Usually subsists in leaders. Tends to think of all other ideas as inferior, and will try ways and means to impose his will upon the group. May use force to get his way.
Countermeasure: Make him see the error of his ways by showing him the impracticality of his idea through examples. Consult authority if needed, or threaten with lethal force.

Hider
Description: Team member who blends in with the scenery using a laptop to shield his presence from the group. Appears to be furiously typing away on his laptop, but in actuality he is surfing the net, playing a game or chatting on MSN. Disregards whatever has been said during the meeting and usually requires guidance when performing his bit of the work.
Countermeasure: Use physical force to bring him back into reality. Slam down laptop cover or yank off power adaptor. More subtle means include emailing him and approaching him on MSN even if he is within close proximity.

Gangster
Description: Team member who uses threats of violence to worm out of work assignments. Usually applies such duress in crucial times. May cite stress and personal problems as reasons for non-commitment. More often than not, the threats are usually empty.
Countermeasure: Be firm, counter-threaten with force or authority if necessary.

Puppet Master
Description: Team member excelling at personnel manipulation. Often gets others to perform his tasks. Victims are usually Worker Bees. May use force, threats of force, favours, sweet talk, or monetary consideration to get their way. Often slips by undetected by the team leader. May edit done work to pass off as his own.
Countermeasure: Warn group of consequences prior to beginning of project, and constantly monitor and check turned in work for crass similarities.

Copycat
Description: Team member who is exceptionally lazy and copies and pastes whole chunks of information from a website without proper paraphrasing or referencing. Source is usually Wikipedia or any encyclopedia websites. Extreme cases may have plagiarized portions still in their original forms in terms of text style, font and size.
Countermeasure: Assign work like research that can only be done through print media. Minimise or totally exclude the assignment of online work.

Overlord

Description: Team member, usually leader, who is extremely domineering and most often possess a superiority complex. Usually moves around the group getting people to do stuff, while not doing anything himself. In short: all talk and no action. Tend to be loud and boisterous in an attempt to instill fear in the other team members. May turn violent if his instructions fall on deaf ears.

Countermeasure: Do not give in to his threats, reason with him and threaten to go on strike if needed. Get the support of the other team members and organise an efficient strike force against the oppressor.

Disclaimer: This does not represent the interests of any authority related to me, and it purely a leisurely pursuit of my literary interests as well as for entertainment. Parental guidance advised.

The Melancholy of School, School, School

Hello people.

Yes, yes I’m back to my trusty blog to write about issues I’ve faced during the endless quest of life. Be prepared for a long and wordy post, I don’t blame you if you click the “Back” button at the top left hand corner of your browser halfway (or even quarter-way) through. Then again, if you’re a reader of this site you should be aware of my love for words, and more-or-less enjoy how I string them together into an anecdote of my peculiar life. Let’s begin shall we?

First a recap: we’ve been together for exactly three months and seventeen days as of 29th August 2007. It’s a long and perilous journey I must say, but nonetheless exciting, refreshing and downright rewarding. I mean, it feels so good to shower care and concern over someone you care about, and she (I emphasize SHE, in case some newer readers get any funny ideas) reciprocates by letting you shower your care and concern over her, and sometimes returns the effort. It’s more than enough for me, I don’t really ask for much, just the willingness to allow my care and concern to seep through into her life is more than sufficient. Being brought up in an environment where myself is secondary to everything else, couple that with my innate nature to be nice and you get a guy who is looking out for his girl at every turn.

Her academic year has begun, and she is busy, real busy, trying to transit smoothly from one: JC life to Uni life; two: from slack holiday life to uber-unslack Uni life; and three: from schooling while still single to schooling while attached. Thus, she’s having quite the time preparing herself for the newest chapter in her life. Well my friends, if you’re one of my poly classmates or schoolmates (Yo dudes), you guys should know what I’m talking about. From what I’ve gathered, poly life is somewhat similar to Uni life, although its one degree slacker. Still, the gist of the fact is that poly people have an advantage over JC peeps (no offense to JC-goers) when both education models converge in university. A number of factors justify this, and each will be discussed in turn (MASINA essay, minus the Social, Political and Economical impacts).

First and foremost, the curriculum in university is strikingly similar to that in poly. I can draw comparisons cause my sister is in a JC and some of my closer friends hail from a university. I myself, am proud to be from Ngee Ann Polytechnic, therefore, with information from all three educational systems, I can safely say that I’m equipped to make a comment(s) (fair comment in the name of public interest) on this issue. Sorry, I digressed, back to the initial issue.

When we first started poly, on the very first day, we were bombarded with at least seven projects and assignments from all seven modules we were taking, and some of them were due in like week 3. The first, and most natural reaction was of course, shock (Insert soundbite: Halo_Covenant_Grunt:SFX#23 – “We’re all gonna die!”). Seven assignments is alright, if all of them were individual reports of 1000 words each. But no, they had to be GROUP assignments, and major ones at that, accounting for up to 40% of the module grade. I mean, we’re only in our first year, first DAY at that, and they expect us to form efficient teams with people who we’ve only met like twice. Madness. Plus, we have to do that seven times. Utter madness.

Let’s jump to a JC. Well, my sister started out school well, and ended her first year well: no wall-banging, head-smashing or premature surfacing of self-mortification, depressional or latent suicidal tendencies. Everything was spoon-fed to her. Textbooks? None, the tutors got them to get photocopied notes from their bookstore, where everything and anything on the subject can be found. Homework? Close to none, even if there were, she could hand them up late and still get promoted, not that she did so anyway.

For us poly dudes, its like we had to queue like crazy to get hold of one stupid textbook that we only used for like one bloody semester, and its only the tip of the iceberg if a project - which also counts as our homework - demands information on that particular topic. The rest of the information has to be sourced either electronically online (a poly-goer’s best friend apart from the laptop) or manually through the school library. The latter is too comfy a place to do some serious research, and the materials there are limited if you’re not looking for textbooks. Therefore, the next best place to head to is the mother of all book-keeping facilities: the National Library. You can imagine the utter madness sourcing for information for seven god-damned modules.

The subject matter per se of the projects themselves didn’t help matters, picture going through a proverbial mountain of 10-inch thick monoliths on the principles of marketing only to find one or two chapters which are relevant to the project, like say advertising. Then, when we want to zap the pages we required we’re slapped with a warning: 10% of a book or one chapter and that’s it, any further and you will be charged in court. Bummer. The Copyright Act has struck again. Thanks Mr. Law, thanks for screwing up the already screwed-up public domain.

In Uni, the aforementioned comes charging into the face of the freshie as soon as he/she steps into the classroom, with no space and no room for consultation, consolation or condescension. One word describes this nicely: boom.

Next, JC peeps don’t really need to go online all the time to get study materials, as all of their materials are in hard copy provided by the school. My sister’s JC has an online portal, where her tutors upload work for them to do. You can think of it as the caveman version of Ngee Ann Poly’s Mobile E-Learning platform, affectionately shortened to MeL. If we want notes, we have to log on to retrieve them, and print them out for ourselves. Course outlines, assignment briefs (not undergarments but instructions) and whatnot are all uploaded by our diligent lecturers the day before their lessons begin. They expect us to be ready with our material and read up or prepare any work prior to attending the lesson. To not be ready is to be marked down for the fabled class participation, and as the years progress, that fable will not be so mystical indeed (hint hint).

Also, assignments are handed in through the web portal, in forms of discussion board entries to essays turned-in through the annoying system of Turnitin. The school wastes money on that irritating system to combat plagiarism throughout the school, more so in our faculty, as the media industry demands originality and accuracy. Even so, I personally know a few people who successfully circumvented the system, and still wound up with good grades.

Ah, the partiality of life.

I forgot to warn my girl about the abovementioned, but then again I wasn’t aware of the existence of SMUVista, the SMU version of MeL. Still, I should have warned her, drats. As a result, she was totally lost on her first day of school, as with her other JC friends, all like lost sheep milling about in a new pasture, unsure of where to go, or whether or not the grass beneath their feet is edible or not. According to her, she said that the poly-grads were freakishly prepared before the lesson, and participated with an almost fanatical zealotry in class. I don’t blame them, as in poly, class participation amounted to a mere 10% of the module grade, the difference between a grade, like a C and a C+. In Uni however, that 10% is multiplied fourfold, into EXAM weightage of 40% (exasperated gasp alert). Therefore, knowing the magnitude of said class participation, the poly peeps naturally prepared beforehand to take advantage of the somewhat “free” marks to get a good grade. My poor little girl on the other hand, wasn’t prepared in the least for that, but she’s learning day by day, and I’m proud of her.

Right, time for a benchmark. We’ve discussed the issue of textbooks and homework and compared that of a JC-goer to those of poly and Uni students and we’ve also looked at the double-edged usefulness of online learning portals. Before I go on, I would like to say that my fellow mass commers are really in for a treat by coming to my blog as the whole post is saturated with Easter eggs that can only be understood by way of true innuendo.

At last, we’ve come to the touchiest topic of this blog post: groups. Groups are the norm in a poly and Uni, and almost every module has at least one major group project due during the course of study. Take for example one of my first-year modules: Written Communication. On first glance it seems to be a module that doesn’t include any teamwork, and I thought so as well, until the assignment brief for the Proposal assignment came along. We had to work in groups of at least two, and the worst part was (wait for it), we got ASSIGNED partners. We didn’t even get to choose who we wanted to work with, we just got thrown into a contract. There was no acceptance whatsoever and neither was there valuable consideration. We could have brought an action against the lecturer for void of the contract, but then we were Year Ones who didn’t know a thing about media law. Vinod came too late. In case you’re wondering, I got an A for that module, and the group assignment garnered a B+ grade. Luck.

That said, someone approached me on MSN one fine day after Semester Two began and said she agreed totally with my MSN display name. It read: Another semester of trickery, hypocrisy and backstabbing has begun. How true. In group projects, there’s always the specter(s) of sleeping (literally) members, teammates who suddenly just vanish like Houdini, people who turn in delegated work like three in the morning, guys who go for day-long lunch breaks during group meetings and of course the fan-favourite team member who agrees with whatever is being said, even if it is false, weird or totally irrelevant to the subject matter. There are also the laptop hiders, dudes who hide behind a virtual wall of privacy and anonymity granted by their laptops, and the only way to reach them is through MSN (even if they’re just directly in front of you) or by yanking their power adaptors from their portable computers. Evil, yes, but it gets the job done. That’s the trickery bit of my display name.

Then there’s the omnipresent threat of hypocrisy and backstabbing, which can be condensed together. Usually, from experience, hypocrisy gives way to backstabbing, and if one isn’t careful, he/she could be stabbed by the same person numerous times for multiple modules. Some people are really two-faced: sure they can be your friend outside of school, joking and laughing with you as though the both of you were long lost friends, but throw in a work setting and witness the stark transformation (Insert soundeffect: Transformers_Misc:SFX#001 – Transformation_effect). One little flaw in your proposal, one minor detail overlooked, one little error in your bit of the work and the negative pejorative comments rush in like a towering tsunami. By word-of-mouth, that one comment spawns a host of other comments, some ridiculous, some ludicrous, but all utterly believable to the ears of a third party. Even confidential information can be floated around as though it cost the price of a peppercorn, and some extreme cases had the victim’s personal information being used against them, to force or coerce them to perform a task against their will (academic-related mind you).

Scary? Definitely.

In a JC, you don’t really have to work in teams all the time. There’s only the Project Work (PW) subject that’s A Level examinable in year one, apart from that there’s really no other chance to work in teams if you were not in a CCA. In poly and Uni, we were thrown (notice the usage of the term thrown) into groups, and given limited freedom in choosing who we want to work with. Also, we don’t know the individual capabilities of people until we got to know them better, and that comes only after a year of scrapping through projects with people who initially proved capable, only to fail you when it comes to crunch time.

With that, I’ve come to the end of my rare post. The purpose of this post is to allow my thoughts about this subject to be penned down, as my girl’s going to Uni has made me think about this issue a bit more as compared to the past. It also helps me to vent frustration, sort of. Nonetheless, thanks for reading another of my wordy posts.

Cheers.