Five minutes later, I finished and sent it off. Then the voice came back, “You haven’t updated your blog for a month! Get to it!” And to appease him (her? it?) I decided to copy-paste the testimonial here.

What I like most about Abbey College were the teachers. They work very hard to ensure that all students work to their best of their capabilities. Not only do they teach the syllabus thoroughly and clearly, they also encourage us to work beyond our textbooks. Apart from teaching, the Abbey staff are also extremely brilliant at helping us students navigate through the university admissions maze that is UCAS. I was given great support on constructing my personal statement, and the college organised mock interviews to ensure I’d be ready for my Cambridge interview.

The other great part of Abbey College are the students. Students from all over the world come to Abbey, giving it a uniquely international feel. The students are generally very friendly as well, and are great fun to talk to. I personally had a great group of friends with which I could discuss certain topics we were studying, or just as easily talk about the most inane conversation topics. And practically everyone is staying near other students, I never felt lonely or bored in Cambridge.

Speaking of Cambridge, the city itself is an amazing place to be in. Cambridge is quiet enough that you can study without interruption, but there’s plenty of things to do if you need to go out. The school itself is located far to close to many good restaurants, which unfortunately meant I gained a lot of weight early on. There’s also a cinema and bowling alley barely five minutes from Abbey, and the city centre with its infinite number of shops is a good place to spend your weekend (and money!). And of course, Cambridge University is tantalisingly close, which makes great motivation.

“Now start writing about your experience at Cambridge!”

Too lazy, I’ll do it some other time.

“NO! You procrastinate too much and you keep wasting time…”

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.

Dustin North resigns from CILC.

Datin Frieda Pilus’s response.

Miss Sam’s (the other teacher) resignation letter.

Dustin North’s follow-up.

Please be sure to read at least the first two links fully before taking a side.

(By the way, it feels to me that Miss Sam’s letter is suspiciously similar in style and substance to Dustin’s own writing.)

I’m happy with my results :)

By the way, if you’re interesting in the grade boundaries, look here. And if you want to know the difference between raw marks and UMS, read this.

• 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.

Dear Applicant

I am very pleased to inform you that you have been made a conditional offer to study at Trinity College. Many congratulations!

…

Speechless. Just absolutely speechless.

(D for distinction by the way :D)

I’m happy :) Now, it’s time to leave Malaysia. Goodbye everyone! To all my friends, family and of course, Raina, thanks for the great, awesome time while I was home!

-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

20:48 Y

r u coming to sch on mon or tue?

20:49 Jiann Meng

? no

20:49 Y

juz wanna inform u that u scored 97.5% in ur IKM

u r the highest

in Sri KDU n

20:49 Jiann Meng

oh ok thanks

20:50 Y

97.5% is the top marks achieved in Malaysia

-.-;;

Zerg for Starcraft 2 was announced today. HAPPY TIMES.

:D

What :

I’m playing on the Wii – Super Paper Mario
I’m watching on Youtube right now : Happy Tree Friends
Book I’m reading : Thief of Time (Terry Prachett)
Major homework I’ve yet to complete : book report (1k-1.5k words)

:(

Also, the emo-ness of several people have gone up, based on their blogs.

:O

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.

http://www.mindomo.com/view?m=0313768c754a56273b7af45c3a9c4be7

Perhaps I’ll make some more?

There are 3 streams in my school (KDU) which Form 4′s get to join. Pure Science (Bio + Chem + Phy), Sub-Science (Pys/Bio + Chem + Accounts/Economics) and Humanities (Econ + Commerce + Accounts/Art). And somehow, our school decided : from 9 Form 3 classes, we are to squeeze everyone into 7 classes this year : 3 PS, 2 SS and 2 HU.

Wtf? How will that work?

Surprisingly, there was even left over spaces in some classes. But anyways, first thing in school was to get to the hall and wait for streaming. So we entered at 8 and sat and waited.

And waited.

And waited.

And waited.

30 minutes of waiting later, Mrs. Chan (principal) enters the hall. And proceeds to explain the entire streaming system. WHICH WAS ALREADY EXPLAINED 6 DAYS AGO. AND TOOK 40 MINUTES TO EXPLAIN. Let me just say that shoestrings are extremely good boredom-relievers.

Another 20 to merely organize students into groups based on results. Sigh. Finally When that was done, break time! And Mrs. Chan had a surprise for us. It seems they replaced our old canteen operator with a new one (probably because of out complaints last year (one case of maggots in rice D:)) which would hopefully be much more efficient. Oh, and they changed the system of lining up for food, which would create less chaos (last year’s canteen was like a third-world country village when everyone is starved and people start throwing food from helicopters).

Long story short, the new canteen operators sucked, the cashiers were inefficient, the line was slower than a turtle in a puddle of glue and the food was more expensive and in less quantity. A case of ‘the grass in greener on the other side because someone painted it green.’

Then back in the hall, we finally were sorted into our classes. I got into Pure Science ^.^ But there was something unique this year as my class is actually made of 17 PS students and 12 Sub-Science (Physics) students to make a mixed class.

So yes, there will actually be literally two different classes of students in 4 Mozart. This should be interesting.