barely passed my social studies. actually, i failed at first, but out of sympathy the teacher let me passed by adding two marks somewhere. i screwed my sbq big time, got only 2 marks (3 after sympathy mark). seq was not so bad though.

shrugs, the only thing that i did well this term was unexpectedly chemistry... i passed a maths somehow, some miracle or something caused me to get 53. and previous calculations i did showed that i would at max get 49 marks. i wonder how i passed heh. but i still got into the maths remedial coz its just borderline marks. i still think my total marks will register a fail though, thanks to physics.

and talking abt that, we had our first phy lesson with our new phy teacher today. she taught us stuff that we were supposed to know but thx to the old physics teacher, we didn't know. the new phy teacher felt quite surprised too, that we didn't know the formulaes.

anyway, there's physics remedial too... shrugs. im ok with remedials on anyday except for 11th march, where i go to shaw lido to battle it out. if by some luck it falls on 11 march its fated i guess =\ or i'll find some way to pon or something. funny thing is when i want to attend an event the school plans something on that same day. happened during last year's s.h.e concert and this year's s.h.e autographx session already. hope it doesn't happen again.

somehow my arms are tired today, cant type properly, have to type in short form and stuff. strange thing, i guess running 1.6x2km has an effect on my arms too? i've never liked typing anyway, it just so happened that i type fast for some reason.

haven't been blogging proper lately, quite lazy and stuff. installed 2 bf2 mappacks for the saf server for pubbers to try out if they like... though i screwed up the server along the way, but magically i fixed it somehow.

downloaded vista february ctp on saturday, installed it for a few days already, finally got the goddamned sound working, albeit with lots of distortions. i tried 24-bit sound already, still distorts. and the bug report client doesn't work on vista, refuses to generate the ticket, in the end i replaced the ticket.xml with the one with xp and it worked. grr... i fathom that its the security in vista that's causing this. when i have the time n mood i'll do a review of vista.. don't have vmware or virtual pc non-trial though so i have to shuttle to and fro just to get screenshots. so the review will probably be done in parts.

got sunburned a little when i went to asian aerospace 06, was so damn bloody hot that i thought i was running a fever when i got home. the heat dissipated by monday, thank god :). i hate the weather. i'd rather return to the rainy days of january.

talking abt months, today's the last day of february... march has arrived already... first three months gone. and i think i have wasted these three months on mindless endeavours. haven't studied much. i can already feel the stress that's awaiting me next year. hopefully i won't be retained this year, this is my greatest fear.

and it doesn't help that the school ranking dropped. if only it didn't, then perhaps the school could've cut us some slack. but then it did.

i guess i've blogged enough today. here's a pix for all of ya.

reuben
@ 9:26 PM.

oh well, lost to 69er in the first round of the playoffs. we won the first round, but lost the second. we made the mistake as them in the first round, only that it happened earlier, when they had 20 more tickets than us... we lost our base and we got killed one by one. it's no good being cornered.

what's done is done anyway, we're still going to play in the lower brackets. but we can't afford to lose anymore.

installed vista 5308, quite good but no sound drivers still grr.

reuben
@ 2:09 PM.

bought tix to asian aerospace 2006, going with some of my clanmates heh..

the new timetable is good, phy teacher gone for good. but damage has been done, failed physics..

dling vista beta 2 now ;)

reuben
@ 8:39 PM.

I failed A Maths and passed E Maths... results are 11/30 and 18/30 respectively. Oh well, at least not as bad as I expected, since most of the class got single digit scores for A Maths... heh mr lee was giving an inspirational talk to the sec4s, probably because he's worried that this year's sec4s will end up as bad as last year's one.

was caught for having long hair yesterday, was like omgwtfbbq my dad just cut my hair two weeks ago... so after cca i went to the barber n got my hair cut. yeah i passed the test today... if i'd fail then the teacher must be blind.

oh well our english teacher is gonna be changed with mr fernandez, our lower sec history teacher. so we're gonna hear more magical clicks n stuff... lessons will be less boring, but i dun think i can slack for english anymore =\.

there's 4 physics w/s to complete, i don't think i'll complete them... just looking at the part where i have to plot a graph turns me off..

reuben
@ 2:41 PM.

yay, our clan is finally getting a server... only bad thing is that there's training everyday heh. but common tests are already over... but i think i'm gonna do badly for many subjects... english was harder than i expected... somehow i always find summary harder than the comprehension but in the end i do much better in summary than my comprehension... what gives?!

reuben
@ 12:29 PM.

exams are over, hooray... now the mad rush to file stuff up...

reuben
@ 11:22 PM.

made my new specs today, gonna collect it on saturday. optician gave an analysis as to why the specs spoiled. reason: chemical reaction... yeah so that's chemistry in action, heh. first time this sorta weird thing happened.

so i'm stuck with slightly blurred vision for the next 3 days... and another $100 gone down the drain. i still haven't collected my GPA form yet.

i can't believe i helped a classmate solve an a maths question which i found tough before. that's real strange stuff.

and bf2 patch 1.2 doesn't seem to turn out to be as bad as people described it to be. i still managed to get 11 kills w/o dying.

reuben
@ 10:22 PM.

so yeah my one-month-old spectacles decided to screw itself up by having some spots appearing (on the lens) out of nowhere. couldn't remove them. tried all ways possible to remove them, including rubbing hard. didn't solve it. colgate? alleviated a little but still no go. so i ended up with a couple more scratches. and i wiped it using the goddamned cloth that they supplied.

so my father brought the specs to the optician. and the optician f**king claimed that it's my f**king fault. YEAH RIGHT, IF SPOTS APPEAR OUT OF NOWHERE, THEN IT'S MY FAULT. SO I USED BLACK MAGIC TO MAKE THEM APPEAR? nice theory there, bastards. never in my life will i ever patronise such opticians again. lesson learnt? never go for cheapskate lenses. thank god it happened now, imagine when it's an important exam and suddenly my lens starts 'corroding'...

so i'm back to using my two-year-old spectacles, surprisingly still going strong with only minor scratches.

and bf2 patch 1.2 has leaked out to the internet. jets and choppers are terribly nerfed with the aas suddenly becoming godlike. i can foresee people tking over the use of the uss essex next time... soon enough, bf2 would be cs with humvees (let's see, i bet people will start complaining about the tank being overpowered and the AT will soon be a 1-hit-kill weapon).

haven't mentioned anything about the common tests yet, because i dread it.. chemistry and chinese was hard today, the former being worse. chinese i think i still can make the grade... must read more chinese newspapers! tomorrow's physics and history... how do i calculate tension? nfi.

there's no assembly tomorrow, it'll be subbed with the last two periods of thursday. meaning there's assembly on thursday... quite the right time to do this, as the maths teacher is on course this week, so two free maths period tomorrow!

also somehow our physics teacher is taking the period of chemistry tomrorow (chem teacher busy on that day), and i wonder why. physics test is on the first period. the chem period is on the second. ingenious.

today is a crappy day... thank god no one irritated me thus far if not i'd pity that guy.

reuben
@ 9:31 PM.

common test this week... maths and social studies down... i think i'm going to fail/barely pass maths... several questions i got stuck somewhere...

tomorrow's chemistry test, while looking through the textbook, there's a glaring spelling mistake on page 60... at the end of the page. "ehtanoic acid". heh. a new kinda acid? i don't think i'll do well tomorrow, brain too full to store all the structural formula crap. and i still have to memorise the 應用文公函格式... damn it.

round 10 of bf2wt schedules have been posted. now we're against some american clan who hasn't experienced defeat before. damn it. but i don't know the true capability of their team, as they won several matches due to forfeits. i'm not really worried about that, what i'm worried about is that we might have to play them 3am in the morning... no one wants to do that!

it's amazing how the audio/video community progresses... i mentioned about staxrip at the start of the year, and now there's a new version with many more features...

same goes for phpbb, acyd burn just committed the long-awaited permission system! however, i have no time to install the cvs yet :(. maybe tomorrow...

our dear principal doesn't seem to be happy. he was walking around the plaza (otherwise known as the parade square), smsing someone... then there was an important meeting for the teachers, it's the first time where i see teachers having a meeting before the morning devotion... must be very important!

our chinese teacher seems to be especially worried... i would be, too, if my ricebowl is at stake... i mean, it can't be a good omen if the school distinction rates for the subject you're teacher plunges right? and we're expected to score a1 and a2 for standard chinese this year... i think that's a darn far-fetched goal. perhaps i can improve my chinese by visiting sites like this. heh. or perhaps real news or tabloid crap. too used to reading traditional chinese nowadays, i think i'd better go back to what i'm learning...

i guess that's all for now... can't think of anything else off my mind currently. noticed i haven't been making long posts in quite a while... so this should suffice for now.

reuben
@ 9:48 PM.

Decided to pay a tribute to my school's article on Wikipedia today.

(click to enlarge)

I wonder who was the moron who just cut and paste information over blindly... Anyway, kind me decided to slot in the right info...

Went to Mirama Hotel this evening to celebrate my aunt's 61st birthday... ate quite a lot as it was a buffet... had lots of satay and duck.

After that, went to one of my uncle's house... relatively new, a three storey + basement property at tai huan cres. went there last year on cny... so it's my 2nd time there! i still think my place's better though, nice as it is, their huge plasma tv doesn't have cable to go with it. and the computer... forget it :).

Heard from one of my cousin (old boy from Catholic High... his/their (his bro also from cat high) father (my uncle) is also an old boy) that in the past the school also asked for donations frequently... and told me to just ignore 'em n just give a small amount. so it's not a phenomenon that started with lhb, don't worry... i guess all catholic schools are like that. live with it.

time to upload the photos i took today before my cousins start bugging me for it... maybe i'll do some psing lol.

reuben
@ 11:23 PM.

my school didn't seem to do as well as last year... our special stream lagged behind many other schools. and u can see how disappointed mr lee is... pacing up n down the corridor, and he didn't bother to announce through the pa system this year's o lvl results. had to find out through out english teacher...

oh well. i guess that's a holiday gone =\.

reuben
@ 6:39 PM.

Wow, the BF2WT playoffs start next week..

tomorrow the o lvl results come out. hopefully my school does well. so that the common tests would be cancelled. as if... hopefully there'll be a half day somewhere though..

and those who bought the sun & rooney cds will have to return them, heh. i think the school is pissed with them...

reuben
@ 9:20 PM.

today's assembly was from hell. stupid sec4s pushing and shoving, i'm kinda glad the teacher put a stop to all these shiat. and i think the bands can forget about stepping in here again...

enough about unhappy things, we fought aef gb today, and emerged winners :D. pwned them totally in the 2nd round. so now we're ranked 2nd in our section, the 1st being siberian bf.nut also from singapore.

australian clans are completely owned i guess.

reuben
@ 9:54 PM.

i'm a procrastinator. in the end i didn't study yesterday... too excited, today there's a match against AEF GB that we'd better win...

reuben
@ 5:45 AM.

blogger keeps getting down... wonder whether i should switch to MT...

reuben
@ 5:34 AM.

blogger is SLOW lately, and I really mean it... it can take a few mins just to load this bloody blogthis page... and what irks me most is that when i press the reload button, the page starts loading... then i have to wait for it to load again... damn it.

sigh, i miss long weekends like the cny one last week... i'm finding saturdays and sundays too short! half the term is already gone, just 5 more weeks to endure for a week's break. actually i feel that one week is nothing... sigh. i think i'm gonna need tuition for maths (n chinese?), i just can't make the cut. the a maths textbook is bloody useless, the examples are dumb. i don't see anything about the synthetic method etc etc inside the book.

did some wowing yesterday, got up to level 10... today got a little sick (of wow) though, so i decided to abstain for a while... and played bf2 instead. had some nice scores today, but forgot to screenshot. one round in gulf of oman i got 31 kills and 0 deaths, quite an accomplishment for me, considering that i usually crash my plane some how or another. of course there are persistent enemy pilots trying to shoot me down but i managed to evade their attack... now instead of doing a full loop i do a half loop and turn. this will throw the enemy off course... and i don't do it on purpose, my poorly calibrated joystick does it by itself. and whenever i take off i sometimes have to do manual adjustments, it auto steers left or right. grr. luckily not down!

tomorrow's another long day. any day with physics is a long one. any day with maths is a long one. and there's maths everyday. and i thought having maths 4 times a week last year was bad enough, now we have them 5 times a week, with monday being a double period. yes, there's double maths tomorrow. and it has to be at 8am... if only the teacher falls sick... i will jump for joy (and not get stuck in mid-air).

and there's cca tomorrow. grr. i've learnt to take things in my stride and learnt that i don't have to complete questions quickly :), to save myself some trouble. sometimes showing off isn't good. coz when your relatives have a computer problem, they'll come looking for you. all the time. always. being a little selfish doesn't hurt, i guess.

2 weeks more to common test, and i've haven't started studying yet... i think i'll spend the whole of week 6 mugging for one-two hours everyday. time to fire up good ol'e sunbird... i last used sunbird during the final year common test last year, and it did keep me in discipline for a while, but after CT was over, i just left it aside. i guess it's good for it to 從出江湖 again? hopefully i'll have the discipline to stick to the timetable for the whole year. or not...

i found a bright pixel on my digicam's ccd... and i thought having an irritating green one was bad enough, now god has blessed me with a white one on the ccd. anyway, i won't bother sending it for remapping, that's $200 for software interpolating which i can easily fix via photoshop. 1 pixel lost out of 5 million pixels, i don't think that's a huge percentage to worry about... and since it's good to take BRIGHT pictures, then the little white spec shouldn't turn out to be a big problem...

my ipod earphones seems to be giving me louder bass... i don't know whether it's by nature or another of it has spoilt. if it's spoilt, then damn it... 2 spoilt within a timeframe of less than 6 months?!

the 7800gs agp is FINALLY out after months of procrastinating on nvidia's part. ATI so far is NATO. yeah they once promised us that the r520 agp would be released, and they went back on their word. sure, the x850xtpe is still a worthy competitor to the 7800gs agp (surprisingly!) and sometimes even beats the 7800gs in some proggys, it doesn't support SM3.0 goodness... and who knows maybe EA will pull another trick and stop supporting sm2.0 in bf3 or whatever.

i guess the agp road is finally sealed with the release of 7800gs. nvidia has showed us what their idea of a 7-series agp top-end product is, and it's seriously disappointing. i'd rather save $100 and go for the 6800gs. sobz, and the 6600gt is selling for $209 now, something i paid $399 for last april... technology gets dated very fast. when i first purchased my rig in feb, 9600pro was still sort of the 'mainstream', and i can't believed i shelled $179 for it last time. and i really regret choosing the agp path when i bought my rig then. and s754 too. damn i thought by going with a64 i had the foresight, but NOT THE OLDEST PLATFORM! but at least my mobo is the only one S754 mobo that has 2GHz HT. and in the cpu test in 3dmark06, it beats the hell out of S939 3000+ cpus. my only excuse i can give, i guess.

oh, and if you happen to be 16 and above and have O+ bloodtype, please take a look at this thread. she's only 17 and has blood cancer... if only i were 16 i'd probably help already.

i guess that's enough for now... i think this is one of the longest posts i've ever made!

reuben
@ 8:48 PM.

I'm surprised that people have wisened up.

reuben
@ 8:35 PM.

haven't been blogging properly lately.

computer problems.

first my dvd drive fk'ed up. bought a new one.

then i wanted to reformat. couldn't see my other partition. found out it's due to the 128gb limit. so i did a slipstream of sp2.

and guess what, it refused to boot.

at last, some 10 cds later, i finally got a bootable cd... sigh. though it doesn't work perfectly, sometimes it says that one of the files are corrupted and i would have to reboot.

i can't catch up with maths, seriously. too complicated, too fast.

forgot to bring my dwit book today. damn. but at least the teacher isn't the fierce kind!

talking about teachers, the DM has left the building, to seek higher aspirations in the private sector. i wish him good luck in his future endeavours... same goes to the HOD of chinese. not really the teachers i like, but it's only proper that i wish them luck in whatever they do.

yesterday's devotion was from mr y*o. surprisingly the devotion was better than i expected. remember to 聽 and not 听. he's transferring schools as well, at the end of march. no surprise why he chose to transfer to another boys' school ;)

anyway, i just tried world of warcraft (borrowed my friend's debit card for the 10-day trial) and it's quite fun once you get the hang on it... but i'm still struggling at level 5, heh. wow is a nice change from bf2... i can idle the whole day there and not get killed once :) and i can run it in window mode! as i'm blogging wow is actually running in the background... in bf2 even if you could do window mode you can't alt tab without a dual core cpu...

missed my sch. dental appt. today, no one seems to be going, hah. and i forgot to bring my toothbrush

i guess that's all for now... hopefully nothing bad happens to my com already.

tomorrow's friday... end of another week. what a short week! hopefully i'll find time to WoW till lvl 20 over the weekend.

reuben
@ 10:07 PM.

blogging using the on screen keyboard... not very easy! from 100wpm to 10wm....

not very used to school after a long cny break. am about to fall asleep now.

i give up, i'll blog more when i get access to a proper keyboard.

reuben
@ 11:08 AM.