Zit Seng’s Superwall

I’m sorry to make light of these grave matters, but a colleague put it this way and I thought it was quite an interesting take: too much stress in NTU, too much partying in NUS. This is about the two student deaths that occurred this same week. A student at NTU was said to have stabbed his professor apparently after having lost his scholarship due to deteriorating grades then subsequently falling to his death, and an exchange student at NUS  apparently passed away after having had too much to drink.

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Times must be bad, so car dealers are even coming to NUS to sell cars. Or perhaps it isn’t so bad afterall, so much so that our dear students have become a lucrative market for car dealers to target. Well, it’s one of the more unusual bazaars at NUS. There’re a couple of other booths, such as Automobile Association of Singapore, V-Kool, and one selling stickers. It’s a mini motoring fair.

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The last two days I’ve been attending class at the Singapore Management University’s downtown campus. It’s actually my first visit to the SMU campus, so during the breaks I went around exploring the place a little. I always thought it would be nice to be studying in such a central downtown location. All the shopping, movies, and other entertainment just a stone’s throw from studying.

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I’ve been wanting to say this for the longest time. Since receiving this mass email this morning, I thought it might as well be now. SOME NUS STUDENTS ARE REALLY VERY STUPID! Does it make sense to leave a notebook out there in the open, walk away from it, and expect it to stay put exactly where you left it when you return 10 minutes later?

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This week is IT Security Week at NUS, and so they have an IT Security Carnival held at the Forum. They have been running this for some years now, and I must commend the organizers for their excellent work all around. In my opinion, this is one of the more successful and meaningful event, and I’m not saying that just because IT security is one of my pet areas too.

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We’re starting to recruit student helpers again. They will help us run our network and data centre operations. This is like an internship, a program that we’ve run for one semester already. It is a really exciting opportunity for students as they will get hands-on learning experience working with production enterprise networks and data centres.

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This is the start of “Week 1″. It is the second week of school at NUS because the semester started with “Week 0″. Yes, how very much like computer people to start counting from zero. Week 1 is where orientation is over and classes officially start. Week 0 at NUS wasn’t overly crowded. Today, I’m seeing congestion everywhere.

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The new school year at NUS has started. Many people are buying new computers. Some of them will be buying Macs, particularly since they have gotten quite popular in the last few years. Now, how do you get it working in NUS? Most official help resources are going to focus just on Windows XP or Windows Vista. So here you are, my concise guide to getting a couple of basic things setup to work in NUS.

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Today is the start of Week 0 of the new academic year at NUS. Week 0 means that it is still orientation, school has not yet started. Surprisingly, campus was not overflowing with people. In fact, I didn’t even find the canteen unusually crowded. If not for the FOW talk at which I had to say a few things for a few minutes, I might not even have realized that today was any different from last week.

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