2 days.

Its been 2 hectic days in school.
i miss having PE lessons, and find the purely academic relief lessons is kinda meh.
i miss my PE classes. my angels in 2a1 and 2a2. sigh. and of course my devils in 2t1 and 2t2.
but still, i miss them all. argh.

i’ve had to relief mother tongue lessons today. Like erm woah. mother tongue ???? anyway just talked to them about life in general, and then let them enjoy some video clips.

would rather relief stuff like maths and science, at least i won’t feel so… dare i say it …. useless ? dang. or to put it better, at least i feel like i’m being fully utilized, rather than being used as a babysitter.

After school meetings are ok too, i guess, just not looking forward to contact time anytime soon. cuz i think there are a lot of issues to be ironed out and discussed, and i believe that it will be a loooooong one to come.

been knocking out once i get back home the past 2 days. just feel so exhausted from having to project my voice all day long, and to attempt to readjust my body clock.

Le Weekend

Friday:
spent the morning working out in NTU,
2 X 2k Ergo,
Arnold presses 4X10
Seated Row 4X10
Then headed to the contract school to settle some outstanding admin, and had a chat with Roz, Jassie, QY and Matt.
after that i headed back, washed up and rushed to wheelock NYDC to celebrate faizal’s bday.
nice to see everyone again, chatted for a while, placed some bets on the match that night, and headed to paragon for some coffee/tea at Ah Mei.
Had a nice chat with ah boy as well.
hitched a ride back with Derek, Bei, and Ah Chye.

Sat:
Coaching with TL, and the sparks. I’m wondering if i’m losing my touch. sigh. they’re just not performing as well as i think they can. how much is the manpower issue, how much is me ? I’m worried and disappointed, but they can only get better.

but there were good sets in between, and those give me hope. if only they dared to reach out and go long, as i have been telling them to time and again. just tat bit more.

ran the bridge route, and did stairs sprints at the national stadium, almost puked my guts out after the stairs sprints, but it was good. distance abt 6-7km.

after that went to suntec and novena square to walk around and waste some time, picked up some items that i needed from carrefour (batteries and toiletries) and then headed to Jin’s place for the dinner / housewarming.

food was good. as usual, and the company, Excellent. played loads of wii, ate alot, played taboo, drank a bit more, played Jenga. heh. loads of good clean fun. Trent was a blast too. Apparently he’s a golf pro, and he’s gonna hook me up with some golf gear. yeah!

Sunday:
Had a quick breakfast, and it was off to alumni training. despite the feeling that people would no show cuz of the rain, most of us did show up, and we had a great session. really good. did the 6×3mins sets, 2 race courses, and some other things. nice.

then i bummed around for a bit, and then I had a session with the sparks again. really lost my cool at them today, and if i could take it back… would i ? maybe. just maybe.
just feel that they are taking too casual an attitude towards the db thing. yes you are volunteers, but still. you made a commitment. keep it. QED. if i didn’t take that team, i’ld have a lot more time to myself. as in seriously, a lot of time to enjoy with my alumni clique after trainings, with my Lilies after their training. met up with pals for lunch and all. but no. i also made a commitment to you. is it too much to expect regular attendance? i do not think so.
sigh.

After that had a late lunch at the banana leaf restaurant(opposite the bus park). Good stuff, headed back home to sleep.
and here i am. 8 pm and blogging my thoughts down before i forget everything.
and its a new school day in 11 hours.
faugh.
I’m happy yet depressed at the same time cuz of this weekend.

Day In School

So i woke up at a luxuriously late 8 am, checked out some shows, and watched the latest installment of bleach. i really do not like this filler arc, and hope it ends soon. seriously. but i do like the new arc in the manga. its filling in a lot of gaps.

After that headed to school, and cleared up some admin, prepared the stuff which i was gonna hand over to the teachers taking over my classes, esp the PE one, sorted out by class, filed up everything including MCs submitted to me since the start of the year.

Also have to prepare some lessons, but then again i do not have a time table, so i’m wondering what to prepare….. its kinda messed up. Maybe more 3NT english materials…

So this is the last weekend of training for the teams before the big race next weekend. i’m still not sure if they’re gonna be ready for the race. but no choice. sigh. they are just not committed enough to go the distance.

Some interesting pics

Briefings

Was in NIE for briefings, and it was interesting, some of the lecturers are my kinda people, the kind i like to work with / for, so i think i’ll be having fun while i’m there.

Hit the gym, and did solid chest routine, as well as a short set of ergo.
Flat bench 4 X 10
Cable Flyes 4 X 10
Decline bench 3 X 10
Ergo 5 mins set x 2 

felt good but had to rush off to the next set of lectures.

I saw NJP as well, he was posted to WWSC for his Contract, and will be doing EL in NIE as well. Fantastic.

met up with Eric, he finally got into the system, which is good for him, after 15 years in the engineering profession, he needed a change of environment. He was offered Phys Ed, but he was worried about his longevity (at the age of almost 40), it is a valid concern i guess, though he is the fittest looking guy his age that i know of. So he chose to take D&T and Maths instead, but knowing him, he will still stay active in sports. which is good.

Dinner at JE was good. the Duck rice and the dumpling soup was excellent. the meat was not the kind that gets flattened by the guy at the chopping board, so it was thick and yummy! the sauce rocks too.

Another update at an odd hour

Only slept at 7am on tuesday morning, woke at 1030 and headed out for the incredible hulk.

i thought it was pretty decent, not pretty but pretty decent. yeah.

a few hilarious moments, and plenty of melodrama. the part where they made out and he had to stop because his heart rate was racing away, and getting too fast was pretty hilarious as well. Heh.

Makan-ed at Xin Wang HK cafe. love the yinyang there, as well as the baked rice. though the chicken baked rice is pretty crap compared to the pork chop one. hehe.

Purchased 2 books yesterday (tuesday). Wake up call(the story of Glenn Lim) and Game of Shadows(the story about Barry Bonds), both on sale at a very reasonable price. which is good. paid about 12 plus for the 2 books.

M.O.E. has refused to change my CS2, so i’m gonna continue with EL. Sigh. well, at least its gonna be a fun batch in NIE. saw many familiar faces. Did i say that already ? Yes, I did. the prob with this combi is that its highly likely that i will end up teaching more EL than PE. which is kinda meh.

ah well.

Been busy playing Crisis Core on the PSP, and its great fun! Insanely addictive, and its my kind of RPG lah. hah. should be abt halfway through the story at this point in time.

Also knocked out real bad once i got home, was exhausted from the lack of sleep.

woke at 4 am, and i’m NOT going to touch the PSP today. got too much to do, and too little time.

Seems like my teaching load is much less for the next few weeks, which is will be a nice break.

hehehe.

 

A quick update

Today(monday) was spent doingsimple stuff, mostly admin..

Headed to NIE Gym to do some weights. the 2 basic leg exercises and upright row.

Squats 4 X 10

Deadlift 4X10

Upright rows 3X10

 

After that was a quick lunch and off to NIE Registration @ the Gymnasium(gymnastics room)

Was quite a quick and painless affair. met up with some old schoolmates, and i think this intake of nie trainees are gonna have a hell of a lot of fun! =)

Its about 5 weeks away from the NIE orientation, and i’m really looking forward to it.

as for the wii, i’ve managed to get Bully working, but not okami. ah well.

 

 

Macbook updates

Got the elusive T9 screwdriver yesterday, and did the swap. after that i did a fresh install, and the macbook is flying right now.

also streamlining the number of apps on it as well. In the past, I installed too many programs that i did not use, so i took some effort to only install the necessary files.

installed the new adium beta, and its great! i can also chat with facebook contacts, which is something i didn’t appreciate till today!

Basic Needs:
Office 2008, 
VLC,
Adium, 
ilife’08, 
Skitch,
Garmin training center
FFMpegx 
ipod access
Adobe CS3.(to be installed) 

Wants / to buy or not :
ieverio. damn expensive right now, but it streamlines the process of working with my jvc cam. the trial version only allow it to be extracted to quicktime format.

Things i wanna install but rarely used
Aperature
Comic Life
 

still trying to get Okami working on my Wii, but its just not happening. GRRRR. i should have gotten a local set instead of a jap set.

ah well……anyone wanna trade ?

=p

Training / coaching

cycled a total distance of 54 km to and from kallang today, for the ECG coaching session. today’s attendance was 7 people. which was pretty disappointing

anyway we still clocked abt 7 km. abt the same as usual.

Let’s talk about the cycling experience. Traffic around the major malls were terrible. there were 3 places to take note of: Centerpoint to the Cathay, Suntec CIty, and Vivocity.

Centerpoint to Cathay,
multiple idiots in cars. Nuff said. their jostling to cut the queue to get into the parking lots was insane. was almost hit by a car that just cut in. ass!

Suntec: the PC Show.
Traffic was backed up till the duck tours area under the flyover. and the traffic was NOT moving.

Most notable was a TIBS Bus, those long bendy buses? yeah. that one. It was blocking the stretch of road b/w marina and suntec. that t junction was stuck for a looong time, and traffic was terrible. but jsut after that bus, it was clear roads all the way to vivocity.

 Vivocity:
as usual, people were trying to cut into the carparks. dang.

Serious. UGLY people should not be allowed to drive. as in UGLY in behavior. not physically ugly, though some eye candy in a nice car would be nice to see at a traffic junction too. 

anyway back to the cycling, stopped over at west coast park for a cheeseburger and a coke.

after that was jurong town hall road, which was ok, except for a junction where my shoes slipped and my groin slammed onto the seat. that bloody hurt!!! good lord. it hurt to piss after that. but its ok now.

thank goodness.

 

 

 

Upgrading the Macbook.

Was thinking of upgrading the HDD of 1 of my machines.

I had the option of upgrading either the Macbook or the R60. after much deliberation. I decided to go with the original plan, which was to upgrade the Macbook, because it needs the space more, as i’m out and about, and it saves me from having the lug around an external HDD. hopefull it won’t hit the battery life too badly, but the power usage of the hitachi disks seem pretty conservative, which is a good thing.

Anyway, made 2 sets of backups of my important files. FIrst set was onto the old ext HDD, which is 20gb only, so i backed up the essentials only. as of this point in time, I am still cloning the original HDD with Super Duper, which is a backup utility for the apple computers.

Once the cloning is complete, i will proceed to swap the HDDs. if the com is still sluggish, i might do a fresh install of Leopard, and manually install all the programs, though that will really take up a lot of time.

but there’s no better time, after all, its the school holidays.

I am amazed at how fast the prices of tech drops, and how apple can manage to hold the same price point, while continually upgrading the specs of its products.

PC show…$274.30 + another $120 to go!!!!

RIght. so today was the day i visited the pc show and picked up some things. some needs and some wants. as shuch they shall be seperated and classified as such.

Needs:
Sandisk MSDP / m2 card for PSP (previous ones all KO-ed already) – $42.50 w/ 5 years warranty.

Hitachi 2.5″ travelstar 250GB HDD w/ USB-Esata Enclosurefor Macbook. its been getting extremely sluggish, and seriously, its only go 20-30gb free after all my apps are installed.. damn!!!. – $114

USB 2.0 Hub to clear up the desk clutter – $8

Sony DVD-Rs (100pack) – $39.90 (cheapest i’ve ever seen them being sold.)

Next came the wants:

Wireless desktop (Keyboard + mouse combi) – Microsoft wireless desktop 3000 – $69.90 (ouch)

New Ext HDD. wanted to get the 1Tb disk, but decided to get a 2nd hand 500GB from Des instead. – $120

Picked up some stuff for the others as well.

160GB 2.5″ Hitachi Sata travelstar Hdd w/ USB-Esata enclosure for Lishi – $85

Sandisk 4GB SDHC card for Fran – $26

Sandisk 4GB Cruiser micro for Qy – $26

Sandisk 2GB Cruiser micro skin for Val – $15

Was there from 2 plus until abt 6pm. ah well.