How my day went? That is a long story. But it’s a good one.

It’s glorious Friday. The only day school does not start at 9am. Of course, I exploited the hell out of this and woke up at 7.30am instead of 6.30am. It’s the only weekday I get to wake up late.

Late or no, it’s a great morning. My dad went back on Wednesday, so I’m all alone in my new place. It’s a 2-bedroom apartment which looks amazing. After living in a hotel and a bed & breakfast for the last two months, I really love the feeling of waking up in a house, in your own bedroom. I can just walk to the shower, use it as long as I like. And the shower doesn’t feel cramped. Hot water flows at decent pressure. There is no scrounging for soap, no peeling at soap packets provided every day when they clean up your room. There is no need to share shower and sink space with the owners of the house. It’s all for you. You take this for granted, but it’s one of those things you really enjoy after being deprived of it.

(There’s a whole story here about the house, the week with my dad, which I have yet to complete. Another day.)

The kitchen! The frying pan still contains oil from cooking eggs and bacon; I better clean that. The plates from the past 2 days are still in the sink, rinsed but not soaped properly; I better clean that. I eat a weird mixture of Frosties, Doritos, chocolate biscuits, and that weird peanut food thing which I never remember the name of, but comes from Malaysia and tastes exquisite. My morning drink is the usual, boiled and filtered dihydrogen monoxide (also called DHMO, or H20). I bring my laptop to the kitchen table. While I eat, I leave Skype on. Maybe she’ll come online? It must be about (9+8)-12 = 5pm back home?

As I finish, she’s still not online. But as I surf Facebook book, I see Aniar Gnok has messaged me. She is online after all! We have a pleasant, slightly dramatic chat. The message is clear: there is much to be missed by my inability to video call. I know this will resolve in a week, but still, a week is quite a long time. Time speeds up quickly, and eventually we have our own work to do. Goodbyes are shared.

Surf the net a little. Oh wait, I have Economics homework… eh, nevermind. I have time after Physics class. I can do it then. Oh, 15 minutes to school already? Better pack up and go.

Should I take my raincoat? This whole week I’ve gone to school with it every day. It never rained once. I think I won’t this time.

I open the door. It’s drizzling. But still, I’m far too stubborn to change my mind. I decided that I wouldn’t wear the raincoat, so I am not going to wear it. Simple. Anyways, as I cycle to class, the rain is barely drizzling anyways. It’s not that bad. Of course, the jacket is leather, so I am a little worried that leather gets spoiled by rain. I think it does anyway.

Enter room C2. The lights are off, everyone is gathered around Richard (teacher) who is slaving away at a electron accelerator. Through the class I have no idea what he was doing. Actually, I have no idea about half of what he is doing. The part about electrons, and the beam being deflected when subject to an electric current was easy enough, but when he began to talk about earthing the voltage source, and using the magnetic force of the coils to un-deflect the beam, I started losing track. My attention span was roughly inversely proportional to the number of wires used in the experiment.

By the Law of Conservation of Attention (attention cannot be created or destroyed, but can be used on something else instead), my attention had to be redirected somewhere. That ‘somewhere’ was the plank filled with oil and iron fillings. I spend a good 30 minutes playing with magnets, iron fillings and gravity (and also did a magic trick. Fooled Shu Hang for 5 seconds). Magnetic field lines went up on the board, and although I understood everything, now I can’t remember what he was talking about.

Sometime during that class Shu Hang suggested that we go to the fireworks tonight. Being completely unaware of any fireworks, I dug a little deeper (read: asked Germaine). There will be a carnival at Midsummer Common, with fireworks at 7.30pm. Do I want to go? YES.

Shu Hang asks if there would be a merry-go-round.

I cycle back to my home and do my Economics homework while trying not to fall asleep. I barely succeed. This time, before leaving, I take my raincoat. It wasn’t raining.

Economics whizzes past. I go over to Shu Hang’s house to drop off my bag, and since it wasn’t raining, the raincoat as well (!!!). The five guys who had bikes (me, and four others who do not deserve to be mentioned) cycle to Nando’s for dinner.

I must digress here: NANDO’S IS DELICIOUS. CHICKEN FRENZY. DELICIOUS.

Ok.

We leave Nando’s and it’s drizzling. I do comtemplate taking my raincoat, but hey, this rain will probably go away too, right? It doesn’t. It keep getting slightly heavier every few minutes. By the time we arrive at Midsummer Common I’m quite drenched already. But wow! It’s raining, it’s dark and it’s cold, yet at least the entire town of Cambridge and most neighbouring cities have come to the carnival. There must have been millions* of people there.

(read: thousands)

We look around for the other group of people (the poor, sub-species of humans who didn’t bike through the rain). They are eating carnival Thai food and burgers, in the rain, for dinner. I can think of far better dinners (like Nando’s). Then the fireworks started; I shall do my best to recreate the experience in pictures and words:

PEEEEEEEEEE BOOM

BAM CRACKLE CRACKLE CRACKLE

WHEEEEEEE BOOOOM BAM BAM

BAMBOOMCRACKBISHBAMOOMPBOOOOMWHOOSHBAMBAMPOP

By the time the fireworks finished, I learn about two things:

1. Some people are completely and utterly enraptured by fireworks (no names, i don’t like making fun of people eltjse and shu hang)
2. Despite stealing umbrella space, my leather jacket is soaking wet.

It looks like snow, it feels like snow, but it's rain.

We went for the rides:

© Andrew Dunn

This one is Extreme (it’s called Extreme). It rotates you, while rotating the seats. By far the worse part of the ride was the queue: there is a big crowd around the ticket booth and you sort of push your way through it while everyone else is pushing their way through it. £4 and 15 minutes of rain later we’re in the ride.

It’s really not that scary actually. The harness-seat-thing means that your body is always firmly attached to the seat, which means that you never feel anything like a free fall. It’s more a sensation of moving really quickly round and round. If you know the Spinner in the Genting Theme Park, I find that to be a little scarier than this ride.

© Andrew Dunn

Then there is Oblivion. It swings like a pendulum, but at the same time the seats are rotating horizontally. It is really, really fun!

And scary.

But fun!

Eight pounds poorer and soaking wet, it’s time to cycle to the cinema to watch Due Date. By the time I finally have a roof over my head, my leather jacket is dripping wet :(

One week later, the jacket is dry but wrinkled. Poor jacket.

While noting, “Oh, this is just grand,”
Jack tripped on some trash in the sand.
He changed his potential
To kinetic, torrential,
But not before grabbing Jill’s hand.

So here are some of the stats:

• 25 levels in 7 days
• About 2000-3000 clicks a day in order to farm much
• Severe boredom
• Fastest time it took to click on 400 squares was about 3 minutes of frantic clicking.

The game is ultimately quite shallow. Just pretend I never started this project. It’s for the betterment of mankind.

The End.

Instead, let’s talk about the NCC review. This is basically our ICT test. It’s not hard, but it’s not easy either, because quite a few things tested were not taught by our teacher. Yes. Really. Thanks a lot.

Also, the paper is two and a half hours long, but most people finish in about 1 hour. Ain’t so fun staring at the wall for an hour so there were quite a few things happening during the exam:

• Playing tic-tac-toe on the floor tiles using stationery
• Gossiping
• Gossiping with the teacher
• Drawing
• Taking toilet paper to draw on
• Sleeping
• Making noise

In the end, the paper finished 20 minutes early, which is still 50 minutes too long in my opinion.

Of course not.

…

Ok, I did.

But in between the mucking about I found some time to study for Biology. Biology is to science what Sejarah is to humanities. Both are subjects filled with facts, facts and more facts (and more facts (yes, even more facts)) which you don’t really notice as you are learning, but when you start doing revision, you suddenly realise exist. That is when you buckle down and try to rush as many facts as possible into your brain in one night’s worth of studying.

Another thing pretty similar about these two subjects is the way you can read them as stories. Everyone who does well in thee subjects tell me that if you can remember what happens as a story, you will have no problem memorising.

 

Obviously their mind is completely different from mine because when I read textbooks as a storybook I fall asleep in about 17 seconds. The only way to study this is to, literally, talk to yourself and recite facts into thin air. It might sound crazy and you might look crazy but it works. I give this method the seal of approval.

Ok, let’s get down to the papers. Paper 1 was a surprisingly easy paper. Questions were basic questions involving basic knowledge of each chapter, apart from two or three questions which are more challenging. Still, the paper was probably what I consider an ‘easy’ paper for Biology.

Probably the Biology teachers set Paper 1, saw how easy it was, and said, “This will not do! We’re too lazy to remake Paper 1, so make Paper 2 harder!” And as it was decreed, so was the deed done. Paper 2 had some questions which were mightily tough, all of which was in the essay section. If you want to get >30 marks for the essays, you must remember in detail at least 2 of the following 4 topics:

• Purnett squares and sex-linked diseases
• The nervous system (all of it)
• Growth of plants and auxins
• Eutrophication and ozone

Anyways, after this, there is what is known as a ’90-minute break’ where students can relax and study for the upcoming pa-

“NO!” the school administrators say in words so emphasized that you can hear the capital letters. “YOU MUST NOT REST. THIS IS A SCHOOL, A PLACE OF LEARNING. YOU ARE ONLY RESTRICTED TO TWO 30 MINUTE REST PERIODS A WEEK.”

“But there’s nothing on now!” the students exclaim.

“THEN WE SHALL MAKE SOMETHING. DUE TO YOUR OBSTINANCE, WE WILL NOT FILL UP THIS TIME PERIOD WITH AN EST EXAM.”

So 5 minutes after the paper, we sit for the EST paper. 20 minutes later, half the class is asleep. 35 minutes later, most people wake up and check the paper once. 5 minutes later, the paper is over and we can finally eat.

After lunch is the final paper of the Marathon Trial Examination Day. Paper 3 is generally not the hardest paper of the bunch. As long as you follow a certain format and know your basics, usually you can get a decent mark without trying too hard. I’m pretty sure the Bio teachers knew this while they were making the paper:

“You know, this paper shouldn’t be too difficult. I mean, Paper 2 was quite difficult already and the students surely would be tired by now.”
“You’re right. Let’s make it easy. Hmm, methylene blue and BOD? It’s not too difficult and we’ve emphasised it so many times I’d be surprised if the students don’t know it by now.”
“Yeah. Let’s use that. How about the other question?”
“HEY DID YOU NOTICE? THIS IS THE LAST BIOLOGY PAPER WE ARE MAKING FOR THE FORM FIVES THIS YEAR. LET’S MAKE THE QUESTION REALLY, REALLY HARD AND LONG!”
“Sounds good.”
“I agree.”

So they make a paper with a very obvious second question and a question 1 which is so difficult technically and intellectually that it took me one hour and five minutes to finish. By the end, we were verily confused over how many graphs needed to be drawn, whether hot or cold weather is good for beetles, and whether a flour container had 10 or 0 beetles during week 0.

For anyone who took the paper, here’s two links for you: Confused Flour Beetle and Red Flour Beetle.

For everyone reading this, I don’t actually know why you’re reading about a description of one boy’s day full of examinations. Maybe you just have nothing better to do or maybe you’re a sadomasochist who loves torturing your eyes. Weird.

Physics papers are probably the most average papers of all the exam papers I’m taking in SPM. By average, I mean that there is just nothing (except the word ‘average’) that can be said about the paper. All adjectives (except average) fail to describe it. Physics papers are not easy, not hard, not fun, not boring, not challenging, not a breeze, not quick, not draggy, not tiring, not exciting, not anything (except average). This makes it very, very hard to type a blogpost about the papers. I will try to write a short summary of each paper though:

• Paper 1: 50 objective questions ranging from rather easy questions to slightly hard questions. Overall the paper was quite average, nothing new or spectacular.
• Paper 2: 8 slightly easy subjective questions followed by 4 slightly difficult essay questions. Averages out to be a mediumish paper.
• Paper 3: So average I can’t even remember the questions. If it was easy or hard I would have. :/

So, in short, the paper was just plain average. Nothing more and nothing less.

• Strawberries – 4 hours; 1 XP
• Eggplant – 2 days; 2 XP
• Wheat – 3 days; 2 XP
• Soybean – 2 days; 2XP

Break it down to a certain unit, let’s say XP per day, and you’d get this:

• Strawberries – 6 XP/day
• Eggplant – 1XP/day
• Wheat – 0.7XP/day
• Soybean – 1XP/day

Obviously strawberries are the best by far. But wait, with only limited amount of money at the start, you can only plant so many plants at a time. Perhaps it would be better to earn more profit at the start, so that you can plant more plants in the future and drive growth up much faster?

• Strawberries – $25 profit, $150 /day
  
• Eggplant – $63 profit, $31.5/day
• Wheat – $80 profit, $26.7/day
• Soybean – $48 profit, $24/day

Again, strawberry is by far the best in terms of raw numbers. And they’re the cheapest seeds so your initial return on investment is crazy on these. So the initial strategy is to plant strawberries and nothing else but strawberries until I find something better in later levels.

Now, another way to earn money and XP is by visiting other people’s farms and clicking on a button (seriously). That money is really really important at the start because you have so little money and planting strawberries costs $25 (including the cost of plowing: $15). Until I have every plot of land covered with strawberries, I have to invest back $15 into plowing new plots. Of course, visiting and earning the extra 20 bucks per farm visited is super helpful in this regard.

So my plan: go to the add neighbours tab and add everyone I know. Sounds easy, but it turns out that there is a stupid system where you need to click, wait, click, confirm, and let the page reload before you can add another one. It’s time-consuming and I hate time-consuming so I opened multiple tabs of the page to speed it up, whereupon Firefox crashed in front of my face.

What?

I switched to Google Chrome which worked perfectly. I added about 15 people in a minute before a message popped up saying I reached the limit for the day. Stupid show-spoiler.

The best part: I was earning tiny amounts of money which is crazy inadequate in starting a farm quickly, but suddenly I achieved one of those ribbons which are achievements in the game. Basically do a certain amount of things in-game and you will be rewarded with money and XP. A lot of money and XP. Thanks to those I had about $2000 to plow away half my field already, only 1 hour after I started. Nice. I planted strawberries like mad.

While replanting strawberries, I suddenly realised a one thing: crops die. I know this because my mum is really, really afraid of her crops dying. 4 hours from 11pm would mean that I either wake up at 3pm and harvest, or wake at 9pm and see an entire field of dead strawberries.

Obviously both were pretty stupid.

But I was in a dilemma. The other plants take 2 days to grow and that is far too slow if I’m trying to speed level. 2 days of non-planting will slow down the leveling to never-before-seen slowness. In fact, the best option seemed to be to stop planting, take the losses from strawberries and not plant anything until the next morning.

Then I opened up the marketplace and saw pineapples, which take 8 hours to grow. Coincidentally, I sleep for eight hours on weekends. Booyah.

Now if you look at my farm it is half strawberries, quarter pineapples and quarter empty. In one day I reached level 7. This is obviously a big cause for celebration and is one of the biggest achievements of my life.

Or not.

It is very likely that you have played this game before. But I have been slightly obsessed over several Playfish games in my Facebook experience, namely, Restaurant City, Crazy Planets and most recently, Country Story which turned out to be a Farmville/Harvest Moon mashup which is pretty boring at the moment. However, I never played what is possibly the third biggest game on Facebook, because I didn’t feel like it. (To be frank, I didn’t play the first and second most popular ones either, Mafia (or Mob?) Wars and Pet Society. But recently several people in the family have started talking about Farmville incessantly, so last night I made an account in the game to satisfy their need for neighbours.

I didn’t actually do anything on the farm last night. This afternoon, I had a brainstorm: a challenge to myself to optimise the game so that I can level up as fast as possible in the game. I created a set of rules and conditions upon myself:

1. Level up as fast as possible. This mean prioritising exp over money, no matter what.
2. Do not refer to any forums for help. From Restaurant City, I know exactly how the Farmville forums will probably be like. Probably full of guides and calculations and optimisations to level up as fast as possible. Obviously this will take away any challenge in the game, so I decided not to refer to any guides, even though it will slow down the process considerably.
3. Help and advice from other people will be useful, and will be taken. However, I will not specifically ask people for help. Most likely they have already seen the guides…

So this is my challenge. Instead of studying for a certain very important exam coming up, I will be spending the next few months of my life doing… virtual farming on a virtual piece of land.

Day 4 has Chemistry Papers 1 and 2. The papers were just slightly below average in difficulty, like our teacher decided to let up on us and give us some space to relax after two long years. Especially paper 2, there were none of those terrible experimental questions in which you have to describe an experiment with excruciating detail. Just to freshen things up, I actually did the entire paper 2 backwards, starting from section C and moving back. It’s stupid and doesn’t change anything, but it felt good at the time.

Also, why do certain people keep trying to do all four essay questions? You know he’s not going to mark the other two, you’re wasting your time, you’re wasting paper, you’re wasting energy, and you’re wasting the opportunity to either check your answers or go to sleep. It’s a lose-lose situation, in which you are the loser twice.

As for Pendidikan Moral, I have nothing to say. See the moral section in this blog post which describes almost exactly what I thought of moral.

For now, it’s ciao! Three day weekend coming up and every hard paper has been dealt with. My only reward this week is a sore wrist and a small blister on my right index finger. Yes, that’s right, trial examinations have left me with an injury. Time to sue.

Lunch time, we studied chemistry and just before the end of lunch, me and Raina ran through the effects of metals on the rusting of iron, which miraculously came out for Chemistry Paper 3. So once again, it wasn’t too hard really.

That’s all for a decidedly boring day.

Speaking of which, when I saw the title, I thought I’d write a letter which goes something like this:

Dear sir,

I found an advertisement inside one of your chocolate bars. The advertisement was small, with extremely small writing and I cannot believe that you actually put this unhygenic gold, piece of paper into a chocolate bar. I nearly swallowed it down and could have choked on it if not for my precise observational skills. I would like to arrange a visit to your chocolate factory together with my lawyer. We plan to see how your chocolates are made, but a few chocolates at discounted prices and then sue the hell out of you unless you agree to our (generous) compensation claim.

Thank you.

Yours sincerely,
Tan Jiann Meng
Secretary,
Consumer Rights Club.

The other essay had me thinking. Do I do yet another boring essay on a factual topic such as “reading”, or do I do the story? I’ve never actually done the story option in exams, due to my lack of creativity, lack of time, and perfectionistic attitude to creative writing. But this time the story option was to end a story with “…she was the queen of my heart.” This is really, really similar to the short story in English Lit called Cinderella Girl. So I got the bright idea of just paraphrasing the entire story into an essay and submitting it. At least I tried something different this time.

Also apparently Ms. Susan hasn’t read the English Lit stories before so hopefully she will not know that I am a plagiarist.

English Paper 2 is the usual. A pretty easy paper. There is a question which gives you a list of qualifications so become an “assistant manager”. Anyone who has watched The Office should immediately think of “Assistant to the Manager” and rewrite the qualifications to include stuff like army experience, sufficient self-defense skills and a love of beets. The summary was pretty hard not in the sense that there was too much to summarise, but rather the exact opposite.

SEJARAH PAPER 2. OH DEAR GOD THE WORST PAPER EVER DEVISED BY MAN. SURELY YOU KNOW THAT TORTURE IS ILLEGAL IN THIS DAY AND AGE AND YET YOU FORCE US TO SIT FOR THIS ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY MINUTE IDIOTIC PAPER WHICH TESTS US ON USELESS THINGS FOREVER AND MAKES US CRY AS WE WATCH OUR SEJARAH MARKS FLY DOWN THE DRAINS. YOU KNOW THAT A MUCH BETTER SYSTEM OF TESTING US ON OUR KNOWLEDGE OF SEJARAH RATHER THEN FORCING US TO JUST REGURGITATE ANYTHING WE’VE MEMORISED WOULD BE SO MUCH BETTER AND WOULD ACTUALLY CONTRIBUTE TO OUR EDUCATION INSTEAD OF MAKING US BECOME LONELY SAD PEOPLE THE NIGHT BEFORE THE EXAM AS WE CURL UP IN BED AND ROCK OUR HEADS IN SHAME WHEN WE REALISE HOW LITTLE WE ACTUALLY KNOW.

I studied for it last night and it wasn’t too hard. Quite easy in fact.