Rant 591 / But I'm Lazy.

Fortunately I didn't get an iPhone. Did you?









Starcraft 2 campaign 3rd round is just like one of the first rounds of the original Starcraft campaign - base defence! Fun.

Okay, now I find Starcraft a little better. Graphics are gorgeous and cinematics on the game engine like the speeches by Mengsk are on the same level as those Japanese RPGs. Seriously, they reminded me of those in the newer Final Fantasy games.

It's also consuming prodigious amounts of my computer's resources, RAM and whatever. I can tell by how long it takes to respond normally when I hit the Window key to return to Windows. The longer it takes, the more demanding the programme.

In fact, I've actually felt lag in the game with this computer! Ok, so the lag only occurs at the beginning of each round, but lag is lag. My computer has never had such non-internet-related lag before, so I guess its age is catching up. I'm not saying its hardware is wearing out but that the latest games are reaching its limits finally.

On the other hand, I'm playing SC2 with all of the graphics settings on High and Ultra.

Pure. Bliss.



I'm concerned though that Starcraft 2 may melt my hardware on warmer days. I've only tried it once before at night and today, it's pretty cool, very cloudy and windy. I'll discover the limits of my PC's ventilation system sooner or later, although I'm not too eager to find out.

So far, the campaign's better than I expected. Lots of other stuff to make it more interesting. NPCs have different conversations after each mission and there are several kinds of upgrades available for different currencies that are earned differently. At the moment I also get to play a Protoss campaign when I'm just about 6 missions into the Terran one.

This particular Protoss campaign has not provided me with Credits but it has plenty of research points for rewards. Credits, Zerg research points and Protoss research points are all for upgrades, though the latter two also give me new units that don't automatically become available to me as I advance through the Terran campaign. Credits, however, can also be used to hire mercenaries, elite versions of the units I already have that I can deploy during missions.

It's a little draining though, with all these deciding between what upgrades/units to get and tension during games, which is why I'm here typing instead of playing.













Teacher got physically assaulted. 14-year-old girl who hit her was suspended. While the general impression I got from scanning a few comments is that they're blaming the student, I'm more concerned about teachers.

I suggest that teachers receive hazard pay.

C'mon, that girl's been caught with a knife before, ffs! I'm surprised teachers aren't provided with body armour in the first place! Wtf is MOE thinking? At the very least school principals should be given handheld metal detectors and permission to do strip searches on students.



Jokes aside, I laugh at parents who don't believe Singapore's children are eventually going to end up like those in Europe and US. If they think all those troubles they have with children won't happen here in our lifetimes, I'm 99% sure you're wrong. You can have quiet children and remain un-Westernized or vice versa, but you can't have everything.

Western culture brings more than just violent media to us. It also encourages us to give children more personal space and more freedom, ie less disciplining. Don't blame the TV. Society wants it or else there wouldn't be demand for it. You can't blame society either, because they're you, your family, your friends, your neighbours, your colleagues and everybody you know. You're going to be pretty much a loner and even a suicide if you blame society for the troubles it invites.

In fact, no one should be blamed. Everyone should just focus on coming up with ideas to deal with it. It's call adaptation. Homosapiens are supposed to be really good at it because that's why we're the dominant species on Earth. Just keep doing what we do and stop playing the blame game.












I don't know shit about English. That's what my first class on grammar taught me. Never even heard of an adverbial and complex and compound sentences until that lesson.

An adverbial is basically the details of the sentences that isn't the object, subject, complement or verb, eg in "I go to school by bus," the adverbial is "by bus". "I" is the subject, "go to" is the verb, "school" is the object and... wait a minute... wtf is a complement?

*checks textbook entitled "Rediscovering Grammar"*

I haven't read the textbook since I last opened it during class on Friday night.

A complement (not "compliment") is the detail of a clause element in the sentence. In "I go to the bloody school by bus," the word "bloody" is the complement because it's saying that the school is "bloody", unless you're taking it to be an expletive or a curse.

Shit I actually understood the lesson!

Compound and complex sentences are bloody hard to understand, especially with the word "but" in the sentence.

"This blog is dry and you're feeling bored reading this," is a compound sentence. The two clauses "this blog is dry" and "you're feeling bored" are main clauses, ie kind of unrelated hence it's compound.

"This blog is dry but I'm typing it anyway" is a complex sentence... I think.













Singapore implements it's own Energy Conservation Act! Companies that consumer 15GWh of energy annually will be required to appoint an energy manager, report its energy usage and develop plans to raise energy efficiency.

This gives me the impression that the government foresees a possible energy shortage in the near future if nothing is done and this is cheaper than building another power plant.

Which means we're getting close to pushing our power supply to its limit.













SIM is actually closer to a good learning environment than what I've seen in NTU. People there are actually interested in what they're learning.

My tutorials in NTU were monologues by the tutors 95% of the time. Nobody raised their hands to ask questions as if doing so was a social taboo. When tutors asked," Any questions?" it was almost always a rhetorical question spoken to satisfy some sort of ethical obligation.

It had always given me the impression that students there went to class only because they had to. They weren't interested in the subjects themselves but were there in order to gain a decent grade for a degree. If they were in any way curious about what they're learning, they would have thought about it and come up with questions quickly.

They were the very people who have turned an institute of higher learning into a degree factory.

Yes it is true that I was one of them. I go to class for the degree at the end and nothing else. Who the heck likes gears anyway? Okay maybe a few crazy ones are but how many would there be in each cohort of Mechanical Engineering undergrads that numbered in the hundreds?

In my few classes in SIM, the students actually interrupted the tutors (there are no lectures, only seminar-like tutorials) to ask questions relatively frequently during the lessons. Then again, the students were different. Most of them are working in the day and don't actually need the degree. The older ones are probably there for fun.

The atmosphere is more relaxed and the tutors, amazingly, bothered to remember each of us. Yea it's a small class but in NTU, none of the tutors ever remembers you unless you talk to them a lot or did something to amaze them. It kind of makes me want to do better, mostly because I can't just fade into the shadows if I suck.

The best thing about SIM is probably the fact that it's a night school. All my classes begin at 7pm, mostly at HQ at Clementi, next to Maju Camp. Ending at 10pm, I can conveniently flag a cab and get home for just 5 bucks. At that hour there are always lots of cabs there.

Maybe I should get a job. But I'm lazy.