Little-Wonder.Net

24 March, 2008

I’ve learnt my lesson

02:30:14 | School Life | writebacks (10)

Just a note to say that I’m very much alive. I know - it seemed really queer how I could grab the time to launch a new design here and immediately disappear after.

Many things to talk about - based on recent happenings that made me shift my perspective on a certain someone. I’ve been warned upteen times that she is not likely to change her ways, but still I held on to the hope that sometime, she will.

She’s disappeared from school for an entire term last semester due to an illness, and I constantly used it as excuse to cover up for her and her behaviour. She is after all, supposed to be a good friend - and so I continued to have faith in her.

Until now. I’ve realized I’ve been foolish.

Covering up for her irresponsibility when it comes to not contributing to group projects nearly caused the downfall of one that I’m currently working on now. I’m sick and tired of picking up the pieces, clearing up after her messes, and filling in the gaps of her (lack of) contributions. It’s sucking up my time, my energy, and it is not as if I do not have enough work to do on my own.

The presentation is tomorrow, and she knows fully well that she can’t make it for any meetings prior to the presentation on the day itself since she has an earlier class - which means we would most likely have to have one sometime during this weekend.

Instead, she jet-sets off to another country, rendering her practically unreachable. Me, and my other equally exasperated group member had to end up pulling things together.

I’m sure she didn’t expect to arrive home today and receive a big fat earful from me - and a pile of work to completely redo.

I’ve already rewritten half of her portion (the initial portion of which was completely irrelevant and directly plagiarized from various sources on the internet), and am already doing a couple of her presentation slides for her, on top of my own. Enough is enough.

Today is the presentation. (Slightly more than 12 hours from now.)

La-de-da. I shouldn’t be sitting here, twiddling my thumbs at 2.30 A.M. and fretting over whether she is able to complete everything by then, right?

Now, off to sleep.

13 March, 2008

Wow, IS students have low EQ?

23:39:00 | Daily Life, Ranting, School Life | writebacks (4)

In my entire three years of being in SMU, I’ve never come across something quite as ridiculous as what you are about to see.

Lemme’ fill you in on some background information.

First of all, this took place during a particular e-Marketing class which my two friends were in. (Thank goodness I wasn’t in that class because I would have hurled right on the spot.) Their required project involved identifying a specific group in the market, create a product or a service targeted to the chosen market and basically, ’sell’ it to the whole class in the form of a presentation.

In one of them presentations, a particular group chose to target us. Information Systems students.

Apparently, these snits think IS students have a LOW EMOTIONAL QUOTIENT.

Picture credit to Liz.

Yep, that little flier was part of their marketing campaign. I can’t believe they actually had the audacity to present such a stereotype to the entire class, especially when it is not even true.

Low emotional quotient? Whatthefuck?

In fact, the act of even assuming that IS students have a low EQ suggests that the creators of said poster do not have any EQ themselves, plus their lacking ability to think rationally.

Look. IS is not about sitting in front of a square monitor and programming the whole day.

We have numerous GROUP projects, and every single computing/computer science/IS student out there will know how important it is for such projects to be managed well. (Project management, hello?)

Working on an IS project together requires a lot of coordination, understanding each other’s abilities and shortcomings, and helping each other develop certain skills.

I should know. Thanks to SMU’s Information Systems program, I’ve been put through a total of 8 major group projects that require the development of some system. Throughout all these projects, especially Software Engineering, my group members and I have managed to bond like never before.

Having to sit around, burning the midnight oil just to get a module running, tempers are sure to flare. Instead, we encouraged each other, guided each other, and basically egged each other on throughout the struggle to stay awake and come up with a full working code at the same time.

Tight deadlines make us hit the ceiling, but this is the time where we work even harder, working together to ensure that whatever needs to be done gets done.

And of course - occasionally, we have members that don’t work. However, due to the highly tedious nature of IS projects, it is imperative that everyone works, otherwise the rest of the group suffers. This means that we need to know how to cope with such conflict.

Did you think we managed to survive all these without any form of emotional intelligence, huh?

In fact, the ‘high endurance’ mentioned in the flier shown above can’t even materialize if we do not have one another’s support. People don’t do individual work in a group, you know? We work AS A GROUP. Cohesion. Hello?

For the love of mankind. Just because we are geeks doesn’t mean that we do not know how to feel for people. Geeks are not like what you envisioned, living in their own world where their best friend is their computer. Geeks are not people who, just because of their time spent on the virtual world, means that they do not know how to deal with people and face reality.

In fact, the tedious and brain-roasting nature of our course is the reason why the entire IS faculty is so tightly-knit. Everyone knows that they can count on each other for anything, and we hold cross-group discussions for common projects to share knowledge and stuff like that.

Basically, my reason for stating all of the above is to emphasize that IS students HAVE EQ, and not a low one as suggested.

And to that e-marketing group that incurred the wrath of the growing number of IS students so far - next time, THINK before you open that BIG GAPING HOLE of yours - about the potential negative impact of your sweeping stereotype, the truthfulness of your claims, and whether what you’re about to say will make you look like the idiotic dimwits that you are.

29 February, 2008

All-nighters and me don’t exactly get along.

23:48:03 | Daily Life, School Life | writebacks (6)

Do pardon the sudden silence - this week has been a hectic one, ironically despite it being the midterm break week.

Seriously, I’m starting to view ‘midterm break week’ as a well disguised euphemism for ’stay at home, mug your head off and slog like hell at your desk to complete projects that are nicely scheduled to be due either during the break, or immediately after‘.

If having lost sleep the entire week (average of 5-6 hours a day when I can only function and remain sane at a minimum of 8) was bad enough, I pulled off an all-nighter last night.

To complete a project that was due today at noon.

Now, now, now, before you start lambasting my group members and myself for doing things at the last minute - the fact is, we’ve actually had a head start, and actually completed the darn thing on Wednesday - or so we thought.

Apparently, dearest professor hadn’t made his requirements clear, resulting in much confusion over the groups who were working on the project. After final clarification with the professor by one particular group, the news soon spread to our group that we’ve done the later half of our project wrongly.

Not to mention the fact that Mr Professor only sent a clarification email two days ahead of the deadline - when the assignment was given … two weeks ago?

From 9pm last night to 9am this morning - I’ve had my bottom plonked on this very same chair I’m sitting on, and doing nothing but Java coding.

No. No sleep for the past 36 hours.

Coded and coded and coded. Became cross-eyed and dizzy at certain points, but still persisted because the damn deadline was within less than twelve hours and there was still a shitload of bugs to be solve and much logic to derive.

Ended up skipping this morning’s class to complete the code and when I finally wrapped things up - was about to drift off peacefully into slumber when I suddenly received notification that there was a deadline for another report today which I was completely unaware about. (See what happens when multitasking too much?)

Whoosh - within two hours, I was in school. (Although we ended up having a time extension since a couple of other groups missed the deadline as well.)

And yes, never got the chance to sleep.

Attended another meeting (which my brain wasn’t focused on) and basically stumbled my way through the entire day - wasn’t walking in a straight line at all. Instead, half-slouched like the Hunchback of Notre Dame, and behaving as if I’ve had too much to drink the night before. (Even though I don’t drink.)

Before this whole episode, friends were already lamenting about how I’ve really dark eye circles - like a panda.

Right now, it really looks as though I’ve been socked in both eyes.

I’m off to sleep - and something tells me that I’ll sleep like a baby tonight and oversleep tomorrow. But who cares - I deserve my sleep.

All of the above happened on a leap day - 29th February 2008. Thank goodness leap years only arrive once every four years.