My World. My Space. My Soul.

It is here again. Honestly, this is the only event that gets me excited as an alumnus of YJC.

Tickets are priced at $10/-. They can be bought at the event itself or from any existing YJCians, students and teachers alike. If you see any YJCians on the street, stop them and ask for a ticket or two.

The event will be held on the 27th Feb 2010, 9am – 5pm. It is a Saturday, exactly a month away. Cross the date out for this funfair! There is no excuses such as you have to work or it is for family only. If your family day on Saturdays, CVD makes a great event for your kids to come. There are events targeting children and teenagers. If you are lazy to wake up from a long week at work, that’s what the 5pm end-time is for. If you stay in the east side of Singapore, that is what the 5pm is for too.

This is for a good cause. Proceeds from this year’s CVD will go to Singapore Disability Sports Council. In addition, to reflect Singapore as the host city for the inaugural Youth Olympics Games, CVD ’s theme is “Fiesta de Olympic Agones” (Fiesta of Olympic Games). So do expect a day filled with games and fun!

Enough said, do visit the College’s CVD page on school website or make a reminder or two at Facebook or in your calendar!

Poster Credit: Yishun Junior College

In one of the earlier post, I mentioned about the upcoming Jogathon. I forgotten to post up the details of the event. I am lazy to phrase everything in my own words (my JC GP tutors are going to kill me ), so here is the word for word version:

Dear friends and alumni,

We are welcoming you back to the YJC family to join us in our annual Jogathon. We are also raising funds for college improvement programs to benefit future generations of YJCians. Do join us for a meaningful day of good fun and healthy living. We look forward to your presence and generous support!

Jogathon 09
Date: 3rd July 2009
Time: 330pm
Venue: MacRitchie Reservoir

For all participation and donation enquiries, please contact Mr Toh Shihua at toh_shihua@moe.edu.sg or 62579873 ext. 353.

Edit: The Jogathon 09 got canceled due to the worsening of the H1N1 situation here in Singapore. I was kind of disappointed, but now looking forward to next year’s!

Yeah!!!  OK. This set of exams was over 2 days ago. I screwed my last paper. I was tired from doing duty for four days. I didn’t know my limit. Now I know better. Still, I could answer all the questions and hopefully all the papers have a pass grade printed on my report card. Anyway, all I can do is to wait for the results. In the meantime, I am hunting for scholarships for SMU. My mum said only 1/8th of the applicants are successful. Stressed. Well, another challenge for me.

Recently, my Facebook got a small mushroom of activities, all YJC related. Jogathon 2009 is here. I was contacted by the teacher-in-charge, Mr Toh Shi Hua for a request on posting a message on the largest YJC group (over 1.5k members by far) I am administering. There were plenty of unsolicited messages before. Hence, I stated that any of such message would be removed. (I recently edited it to unrelated to school.) In addition of adding this information provided to the group, I created an event for it too. Hopefully, some alumni will still come despite that it will be on a Friday. Please, there is at least a month of advance notification. The result of this: friend requests from people I don’t really know and more messages to my bloated inbox (I don’t practice deleting messages. Facebook gives us unlimited space. Why waste it?). I am attending it, if you guys want to know.

I recently upgraded my blog to the latest version. It was not exactly a painless process. I had to manually update the files as the automated script went bonkers somehow. In the process, I had to recreate the configuration file as I accidentally deleted the old one. While doing this, I checked my Nuffnang (I didn’t check for ages). I was surprised that there are ads running on my blog. Gee… Thanks!

To end of, here is a MV hosted on Youtube:

Today, I went to Victoria Concert Hall to participate in the event as an audience, along with Carol. We got the tickets from YJC. Each school has to sing 3 pieces, one of which is a set piece, and the other 2, choice pieces. After 3 schools, I realised how boring can it get with each school sing the same starting song. The only variation is the interpretation of the piece by the conductors and the choirs.

I attended the AM session, meaning, I got to see my Alma mater performing (in fact, they were the first school) along with several heavy-weights. Yishun Junior College did a good job in presenting the 3 songs, although there are spots where it sounded messy, and and hard to understand. It is also advantageous to them for being the first to be up on the stage. The judges will not have any expectations based on previous choirs’ performance. Right after my Alma mater, Victoria Junior College, followed by Raffles Junior College performed their hearts out. It was rather telling that the choir members of both VJC and RJC had some degree of vocal training. The sound produced are quite pure, bright and vibrant, emotions were filling in the notes.It just makes me wanting to take up vocal lessons, a musing I had when I was in Monk’s Hill Secondary School.

The forth school to perform was Jurong Junior College. As expected, everyone had expectations of them doing as well as the previous schools. However, the walk-in already let them down. They had 8 guys, and I assumed enough number of girls to make up the numbers. There is a minimum number of members in the choir before the choir can enter itself for the Central Judging. The conductor did not had the command aura around her. The first few notes out of the choir members sent shivers down my spine and I grated my teeth. I was kind of glad that Carol was spared from this as she had left for a short toilet break. The guy who sat beside us commented, “Epic C.O.P!” It stands for Certification of Participation. In secondary school’s central judging, a COP can mean good effort, try harder next time. In junior college level, what kind of performance are you putting up? You mean this is your best??? Well, they asked for it. The notes came out wrong, flats and sharps; the dynamics were screwed up. I applaud them for their efforts, or lack of it…

After that, the ‘entertainment’ value decreased. The set piece, once again, was getting boring; most of the choice pieces each school choir sang were un-imaginative, or not engaging at the best. But then again, SYF Central Judging is an event for the performing arts of the schools to present on even grounds. So having choice pieces alone can be deceiving of the groups’ performance. By having a set piece, it establishes a common ground for all the performing group. Smart, but still boring…

The school choirs who sang in the morning are:

1. Yishun Junior College
2. Victoria Junior Colege
3. Raffles Junior College
4. Jurong Junior College
5. Anglo-Chinese Junior College
6. Catholic Junior College
7. Duman High Institution
8. National Junior College
9. Tampines Junior College
10. Meridian Junior College

There are 9 more other schools that performed in the afternoon session. I cannot attend further as I had to go back to camp. Anyway, Carol was there for waiting for the results and her sister’s school (Nanyang Junior College) to perform. When the results was out, I received it via SMS (rather, I pestered Carol to give me the results even when it was not out yet.) YJC gotten Silver! Like finally! I am pleasantly surprised. JJC gotten C.O.P, Seragoon Junior College gotten Bronze. 7 other schools gotten Gold With Honours, and the rest, Gold. When Bradley came, he asked for the results too. He was not that surprised to hear about JJC’s performance.

Going back to such event made me realised that I still miss choir, but I somehow, I don’t miss the past… I saw Candee and some others, but I did not talk much to them… I felt rather detached.. >.<

Update 060509: The results (courtesy of Choral Directors’ Association)

At first applications are limited and hard to make due to the difficulties in understanding the APIs, codings and stuff by the general public. However, recently someone (I call them idiots for reasons to be listed below) created applications that generate other applications with ease. This spews out quizzes like nobody’s business. At first we have quizzes like “Which [insert TV shows'/movies'/story books'] character are you?”. Fine, my feed is cluttered with results from such quizzes. Facebook introduced a ‘hide’ option, but very little can be done as the quizzes are stand-alone applications. Meaning to say, I will have to click the ‘hide’ option on every single quiz result appearing. The same quiz, for some reasons, rarely appear more than 5 times. OK, as time goes by, the quizzes get more specific, ie, “What rank you get in the army?”, “Which vocation you are suitable?”, “What is your Chinese Zodiac?” Fine. And now this:

Granted, this quiz may seem as innocent as other quizzes generated by Facebook users. However, this quiz needs an innate knowledge of the school teachers, in this case, Yishun Junior College, my Alma Mater. The only people I can think of who can pull this off are current and graduated students, teachers, or school administration. Teachers and school administration, I safely assume, can be ruled out. They have guidelines, written or otherwise. I am sure they do not want to lose their jobs and they do not have the time to do such bo liao stuff. Students, on the other hand, like to experiment, test the boundaries and believe they have too much time to spare.

Oh please, if there is too much time, study! Don’t like to study? Then channel into constructive activities. Such quizzes, at the first impression, seem fun to do, but it is a waste of time and effort and redundant. (Former) students do not need to do this quiz to know which teacher(s) are in their heart. The same goes to teachers need not know that students are thinking of them. They are always thinking of their teachers! The only think I can applaud is the use to creativity, wrongly or not, I have no comments.

Facebook quiz generators are just:

1. Time wasters
2. Resource hoggers (in terms of computing power, physical and the works)
3. Redundant
4. Distractions

Gee, and I am mad that it made me write an entry on this.