A Stoke of Brilliance

This post has been a long time coming…it’s a gift to my dear readers…for I have traveled the long hard road and emerged on top…now it’s a cause for celebration… by the way, I was kidding about the ‘gift to my dear reader’, I don’t rate my blog that high anyway. So, it’s Monday, and I just finish 2 of the most grueling weeks of the semester (but expect more to come)…sigh…I have been scrambling to finish my assignments by week 6…3 were due on Monday, normally, it wouldn’t be too much to handle, but the Goliath of them all threaten to wreck havoc across my world…this assignment (transportation engineering) was the toughest challenge I ever face thus far…our objective was to suggest a geometric design for a class 2 arterial rural highway. Well, no sweat one might think, I’ve done similar assignments in surveying courses…however, this was different. Unlike previous assignments I’ve ever done…no numbers were given…just a contour and a page describing terrain and of course…class of road. This might be a drive by for your average engineer…but definitely overwhelming for a sophomore like me. I won’t go into too much detail about the mechanics of design, because I can only think of one person who will understand (hahahhaha), but the approach of the assignment was so broad…It’s like… ‘Should I do this? If I do this, would this happen? However, if I don’t do this something else might happen? But if I don’t this, that will just be ridiculous…’ so on and so on and so on….

Anyway, Serene called sometime early last week…and we chatted a bit…she probably sense my usually ice-cool demeanor starting to show cracks…I think she immediately inform the chief commander…Dad…He called not long after that, and we had a chat…I talked about some of the difficulties I was facing regarding the assignment, and he describe some of his experience dealing with geometric road design…I must say, our conversation helped…firstly it calm me down (don’t forget, I had another 2 lab reports due)…but more importantly, it helped me throw away some of the traditional high-school thinking approach to problem solving (which I’m sure we all faced that at some point in our tertiary education)…

In the end, I finish it…I lost a lot of sleep…but it’s finished…I don’t know if I did a good job…but it’s finished, and tomorrow, I’ll happily slip it into the assignment box…and that’ll be the end of 2 crazy weeks…until the next 2 crazy weeks come along. Well, the assignment was really a reality check…1) it’s always going to get harder from here on, and 2) fresh graduates will always struggle once they enter the world of engineering practice, so it’s important not to get to ahead of oneself.

The chief culprit of my misery

My worked station which looks like a natural disaster (this is after i cleaned it up)

On a lighter note…last Wednesday was the Engineering Faculty’s Dean’s Merit Induction Night…nothing too Spectacular…just an informal function, were we get to socialize…the room was packed…I barely had enough space to move around…but do take note it was a small room…so, small numbers…but one should expect that from such an exclusive ‘club’…hahahahahha, just kidding…. Anyway, I could barely hear any of the speeches…so in the end, I just slipped to the back and ate as much on trays as possible… very Malaysian.

That's Raymond on my left (the first Malaysian I met in Newey) and his genuis friend (no kidding, he scored an average of 93%)

For some reason my friend Heng is known as 'The Singapore God'

My gloating certificate

Never Trust a Man to Do a Woman's Job

I realize something…men thrive in routine…I’m sure we heard this notion a million times, but I couldn’t help noticing this fact while shopping for groceries these few weeks. For the past few weeks, during shopping nights (Thursday evenings)…I’ll always bump into my ‘transportation’ lecturer at the butcher section around the 7:30 slot…and as I head towards the cashier around the 8:00 slot, I’ll bump into one of my lab instructors… and the fact that I seems to run into this particular cycle…well, I suppose it’s because I’ll more often than not, be at those particular places at those particular times… Man…I guess I’m not as flexible as I think…Normally my shopping routine revolves around, getting a loaf of bread, followed by a carton of milk, and then to the deli to buy some cold cuts…after that…everything else (according to what I think I might need)…
That’s precisely why men should never be entrusted with grocery duty…If memory serves me right, when the whole family goes out grocery shopping…Dad will head to the confectionary section…with a probability of 0.87 (don’t ask me how I generated those figures, trade secret), that he’ll be holding a packet of ‘tau sa piang’ or those caramel biscuits upon exiting that aisle…times when dad was given grocery shopping duty, he basically lived by the principal of ‘entering and exiting’ as fast as possible…women will tell us grocery shopping is an art…like an A+ project, we have to take time to ensure everything is done to perfection… ‘Enough, but not overdone’…that’s why when Mom goes shopping…we’ll never starve… so women, trust us with pulling the trolley but not with it’s contents…we’re strong but apparently not very ductile…
Anyway, I’m doing a little geology this semester…it’s a rather interesting subject…we study various rock and soil specimen…one thing about geology is that many parameters cannot be quantified in field test (i.e. fracture, hardness, strength…etc)…so engineers and geologist alike have come up with quite a number of ingenious methods of defining those parameters…what I like to call ‘the average joe’ test…test as simple as scratching rocks with a pocket knife, smashing rocks against each other, and my favorite one I call the ‘spit drop test’…like the name suggest, we dap a small drop of spit and observe if the specimen absorbs the spit. Engineers sure are a resourceful bunch (as they would all profess)…Anyway, I know this guy…lets call him ‘Ir. A.’ …who uses a similar test to check for quality of fabric…since there’s no real way to test for quality…what Ir. A. would do is dap a little spit on the fabric and observe how much spit is absorb by the fabric… He must have used his resourcefulness and above average analytic skill to associate quality of fabric with its permeability… I wouldn’t expect anything less from an engineer…