On my first day of forced imprisonment, I found out I had bigger problems. I had to walk for minutes between classes. Classrooms were not made of gold-plated steel or ivory. We were expected to study. The school did not provide chefs from Italy. The school did not provide food at all. There were no massage sessions. The indoor swimming pool was non-existant.

I was appalled.

But something miraculous happened.

I enjoyed myself while I was there.

And 18 months after I began, I managed to survive! In fact, I thrived in the UK. To me, those months in Cambridge doing A-Levels were exhilaratingly fun and interesting. So I’d like to say my thanks to some people:

To the teachers of Abbey College, you are the greatest set of teachers I have ever had the pleasure of sitting down and learning from. Whereas when some teachers teach the information goes straight from the board to the notebook without ever passing through either brain*, when you guys teach I always understand and memorise things until the day before the exam. To Helen, Tanya, Chris, Darren, Heather, Stuart, Ross, Boz, Richard and Sue in particular, thank you for bearing with me for the many hours I was in your class, making sure I don’t fall asleep in class (well, usually), teaching beyond the syllabus, marking tons of exam papers and for being caring, concerned teachers. I couldn’t have done it without you. :)

To Andrew, thanks for introducing me to Doctor Who. And board games. Oh, and making sure I was never able to ever think I was good at maths.

To Julian, thank you for… um… doing whatever it is you do. And board games also, I guess.

To my brother, thank you for doing the laundry sometimes.

To my sister, thanks…?

Penultimately but not least, to all my friends, thank you very, very much. There’s so many of you and I don’t want to single anyone out (and if I listed all of you I’d definitely miss one out), so to all my friends I am grateful for the stupid things we did together; the homework and notes we suffered through; the silly nights spent together; the odd conversations held at staircases; the times we ran to classes; the many, many “Good luck”s exchanged; the cooking nights at Jiann Lee’s my house; the milkshakes; the informal LAN’s; the let’s-chat-while-unlocking-our-bicycle-and-standing-awkwardly-in-the-cold chats; the May Ball; the charity event; the long walks; the short walks; the food shopping trips; Nando’s; NANDO’s; the terrible games of pool; playing Shadow Hunters, Settler’s of Catan, and the many other board games; that night when you pumped me full of alcohol; for letting me sleep on your couch and leech your internet; and for being generally the best friends one could ask for.

Last but still not least, to my parents, thank you for caring! You’re always there (even if you’re not wanted :p) to make sure I’m doing well. Thank you for working hard to make sure I have the best in education and life, and for making sure I grew up to be a responsible, smart, excellent, hardworking, humble, caring, interesting, handsome, amazi- (ok I’ll stop now) young man. You’re the best parents a boy could ever ask for. I love you two! :D **

Those were 18 months not easily forgotten.

* Ok, I stole this from the Cambridge Study Guide.

** You’re welcome.

Make a cheap, portable small box with a solar panel on the top. Inside the box make a little machine which extracts carbon from carbon dioxide (I don’t care how, make it cheap and simple). Now the box spouts out oxygen and deposits carbon inside a little waste box which you can clean every month or so. All for free since it’s solar powered.

Then I noticed a fatal problem: this already exists.

It’s called a plant.

• A*AA in A-levels, excluding Economics.
• Grade S in both STEP Paper 2 and Paper 3.

Let’s analyse:

For A-levels, I already have an A* in Mathematics so that’s in the bag. For Further Maths, I must score an average of 80% in 6 papers (called modules) out of 9 that I’m taking. (Not exactly; I already have a 97% in Further Pure 1, so the average I need for the remaining papers is slightly lower, plus I can rearrange my Mechanics 1 or 2 paper into the Further Maths grade instead of Maths if needed.)

For Physics, I currently have 295/300, or 98.33%. To get an A (80%), I need another 185/300 in A2, or 61.67%. This should not be difficult.

For Economics, I could fail it and it wouldn’t matter in terms of my offer. I’d lose all my pride though.

The STEP papers are something else. Whereas all the above are achievable (I would even dare call it… “easy”), STEP papers are… difficult. An example is in order:

STEP Paper 2 2009 Question 1

Two curves have equations x⁴ + y⁴ = u and xy = v , where u and v are positive constants. State the equations of the lines of symmetry of each curve.
The curves intersect at the distinct points A, B, C and D (taken anticlockwise from A). The coordinates of A are (α,β), where α > β > 0. Write down, in terms of α and β, the coordinates of B, C and D.
Show that the quadrilateral ABCD is a rectangle and find its area in terms of u and v only. Verify that, for the case u = 81 and v = 4, the area is 14.

There are 13 questions for each paper. 8 are pure mathematics (like the one above), 2 are probability and statistics questions, and 3 are mechanics questions. They will mark your best 6 answers to any questions, with up to 20 marks per question. In general, to get an S, I will need to answer five questions fully and a sixth partially in STEP 2, and four questions fully in STEP 3. To give you an idea of how difficult this is, the above question (and the whole of STEP 2) can be answered using only knowledge from the Mathematics A-Level subject, whereas STEP 3 requires Further Mathematics knowledge. Technically, if you’ve done your SPM Further Maths, you have enough knowledge to answer the question above. Good luck.

My entire focus for the next six months is to study sufficiently to achieve an A* in all subjects, and spending the rest of my studying time on STEP. It should be pretty fun.

Fun Fact: The full name of Trinity College is: The College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity.

The A-levels AS paper is devious. Not only does the syllabus have the widest scope of all the subjects I’m taking, but the actual paper itself is ridiculous. 80 marks, 90 minutes; you’d think you have enough time to write down everything in your mind.

I had my mock exams last week, and for the first time, I couldn’t finish the paper. I just couldn’t. I already knew that I’d be short on time, but even though I wrote as fast as I could force myself to, I ended up not writing about 4 paragraphs worth of answers. I hate hate hate hate this feeling, it’s exactly like what I felt during the English Literature SPM paper, except that this time the subject is actually important.

Looking at my results, I scored a 60/80 for the Unit 2 paper about macro economics. A respectable score, but I lost 10 marks because I didn’t finish the paper.

-frustration-

I’m close to my limit when it comes to writing. It’s not just me, no one in my class finished every question. I don’t know what I can do to improve my writing speed. I asked my teacher about what I could do, and he said:

“Write faster.”

Thanks.

I’m sure there’s a conspiracy theory somewhere which links the government, xenophobia, accelerated clocks, corruption and economics together. It’s probably true too.

I am quite sure I had a dream where people could charge iPods by connecting two iPods using a modified iPod cable so that the iPod with more battery would charge the depleted iPod.

That is all.

-mid-2009 or so-

David Archuleta came to Sri KDU. THE David Archuleta (DA), the winner of American Idol (halfway round the world), came to a small (ok, maybe not so small) school in the middle of the country right above Singapore.

How did this happen? It’s a long story. But I can say, it was probably my fault.

First off, some organisers paid good money to Archuleta’s agents to come over to Malaysia. Then these organisers sold rights to many companies to give away exclusive tickets to people in exchange for promotions which bring in lots and lots and lots of money and publicity for the companies. Ka-ching, $_$ and all that. One of these companies was hitz.fm.

Hitz.fm had a great idea! Why not send DA to a school? Run a contest to see which school wins, and free publicity rolls in! Nice idea!

They made a webpage for it. The contest was quite simple:

• Register for an account
• Choose your school from a list
• Answer 10 questions about DA correctly
• Your school gets 1 entry!
• Repeat for further success!

Mrs. Chan, our principal, was/is a devout fan of DA. She called up an assembly to tell every student in school to vote for DA to come to Sri KDU. To rephrase, our principal told every student to go online to win a contest so that a celebrity singer would come to our school. Somehow, she had also managed to print out about, say, 200-300 small slips of paper with all the answers to the 10 questions to help us students answer correctly.

I was quite bemused, but hey, it’s worth a shot to get a celebrity to come over right? Especially since I can now brag, forever, that David Archuleta came to my school. So I went online, registered an account and voted. Nothing special.

But what really caught my eye was that there was absolutely no protection from automated voting.

Chanced are, if you’ve been around the Internet long enough, you’ve seen one of those little images where there are letters which are bent strangely and distorted like mad. These are called CAPTCHAs. Basically they make sure you’re not a robot so that you don’t make 1000 accounts or do something 1000 times unless you’re actually doing it manually.

Without any Captchas, the voting is ridiculously easy to automate. Using iMacro, I set up a macro. A macro is a recording of actions, for example, this macro’s instructions was to:

1. Go to the website.
2. Choose the correct school from the list.
3. Click on the 10 correct answers.
4. Click vote.

All this is really, really easy. You just have to click record, do the actions manually yourself, then click stop.

Now, if you hit the play button, it goes through the list and votes. If you fill the “Repeat” box with a number, say, 100, then it repeats it 100 times.

I was triumphant when I voted 100 times in about 2 minutes.

And that was that. I could so easily destroy this contest. If I set the repeat to one million times, I could leave it overnight and pretty much ensure that Sri KDU wins. But my conscience tugged at me. How could I deprive the other schools of getting DA to their school? It’s not fair, right? Maybe some other true fans of DA were voting right now, every hour, slaving away to get a chance to meet DA?

Well screw them, why didn’t they think of this?

But there was another problem which prevented me from voting a million times. I was worried that if hitz.fm saw a million votes for Sri KDU they’d be so surprised that they would just disqualify KDU from the contest. That would suck, every DA fan in school would hate me, and Mrs. Chan would probably… well let’s not go into detail about that.

I finally decided not to bother voting. Instead I told a friend about this method, then I showed him the exact steps involved. There’s nothing worse that a secret unshared. (The friend was SY. I don’t know if I should involve his name or not, so let’s leave it at that for now.)

SY told CF about this, and together they made 20,000 votes. When they told me I was something like:

:O

o.O

Well, the day finally arrived. DA came to our school. The entire event should be summarised in another post, but here’s a quick reminder of the concert:

In total, there were 65,700 votes. From a school of about 1200 students, and that’s including primary and secondary. I heard that the method spread to a few other students and some people in the IT department as well. In any case, I read somewhere that there were about 100,000 votes total, which means that we voted almost twice as much as every other school combined. Haha.

Why post this almost half a year after he left Malaysia? I’m only posting this because of ego. It’s quite likely that my experimentation caused David Archuleta to come to my school. Wooo. That’s a story I can tell my grandchildren.

To Sri KDU-ens: Thank you, thank you. You’re welcome.

To hitz.fm: Please, perhaps you might want to look into some ways of stopping automated voting? Also, don’t you find that 65,000 votes just a little suspicious?

To other schools out there: Sore luck. Be smarter next time. :P

But… I’m changing my blog! For a really long time I’ve been using Blogger, because it’s just so easy and simple to use. Plus I think I was 12/13 (?) when I started my first blog a long  time ago. I don;t even remember what that was about.

A little history about the blog. The major blog I’ve been updating for the past year (or two? Three? I don’t remember) was hosted on Blogger. I think everyone knows Blogger. Most people opened their first blogs there. It’s simple, it’s free, and it was something like “OMGWTF I get to have jiannmeng.blogspot.com which has my name in it! So cool!” So that’s what I used, and that’s what I liked for a really long time.

As time passed though, a few things really become annoying to me. I nitpicked about certain small details. For example, Blogger only gives you 1GB of space for pictures. Seems like quite a lot, but that’s only if you automatically resize the photos you  upload. Doing so you could hold lots and lots of pictures, but I’m always thinking, “What if I ran out of space? Do I have to delete old photos?” Probably the answer is yes, and I cannot bear deleting historical stuff. If you look at my harddrive, I try to save every photo I take, no matter how irrelevant. I don’t know why, it’s just one of my idiosyncrasies.

Even worse, I really like uploading high-resolution stuff. Even when resized reasonably, that’s about 1MB per picture, in total about 1000 pictures only. I can’t really live with that.

So I decided to use Photobucket. I think everyone knows that too. Unlimited storage! But that leads to different problems. Stuff like having to copy the link of every picture and manually setting a fixed size so that it wouldn’t overstretch the layout, stuff like that. It’s really, really annoying for some reason.

So, what to do? I wasn’t sure, but then Raina told me about Tumblr, which looked pretty awesome. But a short while later I realised it wasn’t for blogging, it’s more like Twitter. The layouts were nice, but you really couldn’t customise your post too well. Stuff like adding pictures to posts and editing the HTML of the post was just plain annoying. So, what next?

I was looking at WordPress. Probably the best of all, but if I took their free service I’d again be limited by storage space and all that stuff. But you can download WordPress (it’s open source) and use it on your own website, making it truely your own blog. I liked that.

Which means, how would I host my own website? What hosting company should I use? Above everything, it needs to be cheap. I’d be spending my dad’s money if I wanted to host my own website. Shopping around, the cheapest I could find was something like USD4.99 a month. RM200 a year.

*gasp*

It’s actually not a lot if you think about it, for a whole year. But still, I’m quite reluctant to dish out TWO HUNDRED BUCKS a year, especially if it’s not my own money. Find something cheaper…

Nearlyfreespeech.net. Interesting. It’s pay as you use, so the more you use, the more you pay, but also the less you use the less you pay. I like it :O

So how much would it cost? Looking at the pricing structure, I think it’s about 30-40 US a year. That’s on average RM100 a year. I think I can convince my dad to approve of that. After all, this is more like a hobby to me. We all spend some money on our hobbies… I think mine is pretty cheap for a hobby.

Last night, I signed up, deposited some money and promptly spent close to two hours trying to make sense of what a MsSQL database is. This morning, I uploaded all the WordPress files into the server, and a few minutes later, voila, it works!

Of course, I think the definite coolest part about the whole thing is this:

http://www.jiannmeng.com

(Yes, it’s centered because it’s awesome)

I have a website! A fully functioning website I can call my own. That is made of plain awesome.

So, what does this mean now? A few things. My Blogger and Tumblr accounts will now be updated anymore. Almost more than likely if you’re seeing this on my old blogs, it’s the second-to-last post I’ll be putting up. Update your links accordingly, please :)

If you’re reading this from the new link, this is a pretty detailed first post, isn’t it?

I also imported all the old posts into WordPress. I’m not starting anew, I’m just making a New Old Blog.

Another thing. The new blog will be under construction for a long, long time. I really want to customise the blog, but it’s SPM season now. That means I’ve wasted close to 4 hours on something relatively useless. If I have free time (and I’m not playing a game, (TF2 is really fun)), I’ll be tinkering around with themes, plugins and stuff. The site might go down without warning since it’s based on a prepaid system and I didn’t credit it with that much money yet. The layout might change everytime you visit, or not at all. I don’t know what will happen.

It’s an interesting new journey from here on.

First I would like to point out Yellow House’s chance of winning something this year. A quick summary of results : in the Ujiantara (sort of a fitness test) Yellow was in 4th place with a 24 point gap to Blue in 3rd place, 29 points from Green/Red ( I forget) and another 30 points from Red/Green.

After today’s running events : 19 (!!!!) points from B, 29 points from G/R and 30 from R/G.

As you can evidently see, we have caught up by 5 points to Blue! Obviously this is a great improvement from previous years, as we NORMALLY just widen the gap between ourselves and 3rd place exponentially as time goes on. This shows that this year, Yellow has a large good decent small chance of overthrowing the crown! No really! It’s almost like the Opposition getting a two-thirds majority!

Next point in question : our MP team has less people than any other MP team. Like, possibly 60% the size of any other MP team. In fact, we probably have less people than in the cheerleading team. Obviously this is good. It shows that, um, we can, um, it shines the spotlight on each individual and shows our ability to overcome any deficit and face every challenge right on without fear or worry! Yes, that sounds good. In fact, we will probably get bonus marks for not reaching the requirement of 48 students.

Also, our leaders are obviously acting. It is quite impossible for one person to be good at leadership, but poor at thinking, one person to be good at thinking, but poor at leadership, and one person who sits near the team, watches us march, and skip class. It’s like from an anime show, except it all seems so real and everyone in the team feels it’s true (except me of course, I ain’t so fooled). Obviously they are acting. Right?

Let us “create the history”!

This message paid for and approved by Y House.

Both KDU and Cempaka are celebrating their 25th year this year! KDU college first opened in 1983, and if I’m not mistaken has I think 2 schools institutions of learning in Malaysia and one in China. Cempaka opened their first school in 1983 also, and now has 4. (I think)

Not having Powerpoint sucks when you’re supposed to do a presentation via .ppt. Why are people so insistent about using Powerpoint anyways when its not really that good of a visual tool in learning? Oh, and OpenOffice, while free, is still pretty sucky.

Studying history in Malay makes even the Punic Wars feel like studying… um- Sejarah. Sigh.

I have about 10 minutes to complete my Moral homework before class starts tomorrow. Once again, I left the textbook in school.

And (overly commercialized) Valentine’s Day too!

In celebration of both, I present a coded message!

Once again our fine government has done well to curb these rowdy internet people. As you will notice, the Uncyclopedia article on Malaysia has some extremely dangerous facts on Malaysia. Knowing full well how impressionable Malaysians are, this article could single-handedly destroy the Malaysian youth!

Here are some excerpts from the article. Please DO NOT show these to free-minded people or it could cause a civil war in Malaysia! Seriously.

The timezone of Malaysia is unique because it follows the system of +1/+2 PMT (Predetermined Meeting Time) which is 1 or 2 hours later than PMT.

Obviously blatant lies! Our time zone is +0.5 only.

The best thing about Rojak Language is that, it is so simple. The grammar law is easy to follow.

Law:

• Add “Lah” in the end of every sentence. Bob your head when doing that.
• Use “maybe”, “can”, “dunno” extensively.
• Each sentence must consist of more than 3 dialects/languages.
• If you dont know what to do next just say “OK” and nod your head.

What the hell? I think these orang asing already siao one lah. Where got we do that?

Hypocrisy is the most important part of national culture and any person who is not a hypocrite is labeled a terrorists. Terrorists supposedly make up 2% of country’s population, although their existence has yet to be confirmed.

WHAT? That is ridiculous. We encourage free speech and welcome any suggestions to improve the current system. Except the Opposition of course, they’re opinions are so stupid it’s like they’re terrorists.

I could go on, but I’m sure any right-minded Malaysian could see how damaging this article is. I FULLY ENCOURAGE the censorship of such a site, as it is NO DOUBT a matter of public concern. THERE MUST BE NO PARODIES OF MALAYSIA. Go ahead and make fun of Singapore.

Anyways, it seems my parents would like to send me overseas, or at least to a different school in order for me to do my O-levels or an equivalent. And here’s the dillema : One, I go overseas to a school where I can have top-class O-level education, and transition to A-levels. Two, I switch to a school somewhere here in Malaysia which has O-levels. Or three, I stay in the national syllabus and take my SPM.

Actually, this is a trilemma, not a dilemma. -.-;

World peace?

Money?

But really, I’m content and selfish enough that I wouldn’t wish for any of those. I think I’d just save them for a rainy day, so that I can live my life knowing if things go drastically wrong it can be righted easily.

Oh fine, I’d go for that and world peace.