At Kah Khang's invitation, I joined the advanced class and turned down Josie's invite to join the class that he would be teaching (okay plus the fact that he would probably use me as an ego-expander-- I quote: "Of course you'll get a silver for NOI! I'm teaching, and I'm such a cool teacher!" That was really an incentive hahahaha)

The class is puny and everyone is like awesomely good at programming. Erm in that statement I exclude myself because I am younger than everyone else and therefore lacking in one year of smartness, and also a girl and therefore a sucky programmer. It's quite obvious that there are very few girl programmers and very very few good girl programmers. Except maybe Megan from xkcd, although I don't really recall seeing any evidence of her coding. I shall go check again later.

But even so, I shall attempt to look on the bright side and say that on an absolute scale, I have improved from, uh, last year! I can code binary searches and mergesorts. Things that I hadn't even heard about last year. Heh. And today I actually coded 4sum, which I remember seeing before and going mentally, "Oh, no. Pretend you never saw this."

Okay admittedly Kah Khang ended up coding most of it for me, but at least the algo was mine! Sort of. They'd gone through the problem in the morning, so I guess it was a bit of cheating. I had most of the stuff there actually and asked Kah Khang with help in debugging, even though I'd sworn I wouldn't-- but when it's 1 hour to the end of the day and you still haven't actually coded a single problem successfully you get Desperate.

And he showed me all sorts of shortcuts and everything! It was quite amazing he looked over and was like "Wait. You're coding your own mergesort? STL has that... -scroll scroll- Your own binary search also? Just use the STL one la!"

I swear, STL is a bloody lifesaver. It has EVERYTHING. And he explained to me how to use everything. I felt quite bad having to distract him from coding, but it was so, so, so AWESOME. I swear it. It's like discovering a calculator after doing years and years of math by hand, except that this calculator also writes zuowens for you. And a lot of other people came too and helped to explain stuff to me, and while it got really scary at times (memory limit exceeded lol) it was just so amazing listening to them and learning all the shortcuts.

I also learnt that STL has push, pop and queue functions, and was promptly overcome by a fit of spluttering because PW and Zhenghao had always told me to code my own versions of the abovementioned functions. So my code for any function using those would be like 2583459 lines long, with a good majority of it being stuff that STL has. In fact Kah Khang demonstrated that by cutting down my 163 line 4sum code to 58 lines. It was a very facepalm moment.

I can't wait for tomorrow, actually. Even if I end up feeding mrjudge as usual -_-

And why, you may ask, is herbal chicken soup so very dangerous? Because it ATTACKS YOUR SHIRT.

I wore my favourite pink owl t-shirt to work today and was amazingly happy because I love owls very much. And then I went down to lunch, met the whole CS lab at a table downstairs, waved, and bought herbal chicken soup for $3.50. It is, in all fairness, pretty tasty if you like herbs and that sort of thing.

However what really gives it its dangerous properties is the presence of a whole chicken drumstick in it. In some herbal chicken soups, the chicken is steamed for so long that the meat or whatever just peels off the bone quite easily. The one I got hadn't, and hence I had to pry it off with a spoon. A spoon, with a reasonably large surface, and a certain amount of force, which all culminated in a significant amount of soup being propelled away from the chicken bone; and towards me; and landing on my beautiful owl t-shirt.

It is intensely uncomfortable to continue your meal knowing that everyone (including your fellow interns, mentors, mentor's colleagues, etc) have just witnessed you managing to land some of it on your shirt. Sartre would claim this to be shame, all the "hell is other people" thing, but I think it's more of personal cleanliness. So I trooped over to the toilet to mop up as much of the offending liquid as possible. Didn't do anything for the smell though-- herbs do have a pretty strong smell-- and left a huge wet patch on my shirt.

And not 10 minutes later I was back in the toilet, mopping at another wet patch brought about by a repeat of the previous event. Between those two patches nearly my whole shirt was wet and my poor owl was fast turning into a herbal owl.

So I decided that this called for desperate measures. Thankfully I had worn my jacket down to lunch, and sigh, I had to use it as a top while I applied an emergency laundering to my poor t-shirt in the basin, using hand soap. It was decidedly a rather unpleasant procedure. And then it was either stand outside drying it out using the hand dryer, or put it on and catch pneumonia. I kind of chose the former, but it took so long anyway I just put it on once it was almost dry.

Meh. From now on I think I shall always carry around emergency shirts. Either that, or disposable plastic bibs.

1. SINGING MALWARE!

I was reading the documentation on IDA Pro, which is a disassembler used to take apart viruses, and this is what I saw: "One could, for example, extend IDA Pro with an mp3 player and make malware sing. However, we suspect our governmental customers are involved in more serious projects."

And internally, I squealed with delight. Because what is more adorable than virus virtuosos! Imagine a whole line of trojan horses chorusing together in obvious delight!

All day long, whenever I looked at that line in the IDA documentation, I would nearly sob with glee at the sheer cuteness of it all. Singing malware!

It bugged (heh) me enough to go google it to see if there were any examples of malware that sung, and apparently there was! Noobs who exploited jailbreakers on their iPhones (Sze Chuen's words, not mine... uh okay noob is, but whatever) were plastered with moving and singing wallpapers of Rick Astley, who was never going to give their phone up. It was enough to set me off giggling again and everyone in the intern room looked at me weirdly.

And then after that, I read an academic paper on virus genome mapping, and they used graphs to model the functions in a virus, and so the edges would be the way the functions called each other. Quite interesting really; and then they'd use graph theory and all that to compare the graphs and their similarity to one another.

But I digress. Anyway, each unique virus has a graph, and members of the same virus family have similar graphs. So all the sasser worms are similar, as are the blaster worms, etc etc. And that was how inspiration struck! Each of these nodes could be a note, and the edges linking them together would be the melody :O How exciting! So similar viruses would sing similar songs-- and my mind was instantly filled with images of sasser worms singing Christmas carols, and trojans doing... I dunno, alt rock maybe.

2. I was pondering the slippery slope fallacy, and then I suddenly realised that programmers have an entirely elegant solution to it.

If you remove a node from a heap of nodes, it might not be a heap anymore, but it can always be rearranged into a heap simply enough.

However, if you continue removing nodes from a heap, you might eventually reach the point where a single node is left. Is it then still a heap of nodes?

AND YES IT IS! I think. Or was it trees? I don't know. But I seem to recall something about a single node being a self sufficient heap, since it IS larger than its non-existence children.

But I love programming so so much. It provides so much fodder for geeky jokes.

Most Taiwanese snacks are deepfried and they have kind of messed with my throat. But they were tasty while they lasted.

Sigh my work ethic has seriously taken a huge dive ever since the end of school. I got on the computer today fully intending to start my PEP assignment, before realising that I had yet to choose a question.

And so to get ideas for a question, I brought up the wiki page on Existentialism, which doesn't really help much wrt questions.

But that is as far as I have gotten. I should really stop reading memebase, because philosoraptor, despite its name, is not really philosophical at all. I doubt Mr Ow would be very amused by a research paper on the topic "What would the world be like if hypothetical questions didn't exist?"

I am going to Taiwan tomorrow, till an indeterminate date, for a holiday. I am blogging this so that you people won't go frantic with my absence and end up calling the police, or flood my tagboard with tags begging me to update (HA I wish). Or, like Crystal, flood me with a deluge of "WHAT! WHY DIDN'T YOU TELL ME YOU WERE GOING! I NEED TO KNOW WHERE YOU ARE, WHAT YOU ARE DOING, EVERY HOUR AND EVERY MINUTE OF EVERY DAY!"

Okay maybe she's an extreme example, because no one else has such maniac stalker tendencies, but still. In case you guys expect daily posts or something.

--

Anyway, one last post before I leave. Xinyuan said I should add a disclaimer, and suggested a particularly angsty and shouty one. But instead, I have opted for a kinder and milder version, which shall read as such:

If you have objections to reading about fanfic, or about porn, or about porn in fanfic, please stop reading.

There. Now that's out of the way.

My story is a story of fanfic. It starts with my newfound obsession over SSHG, but honestly dates back to a conversation Crystal and I had many many many months ago about Philo. It was when I had just discovered the awesomeness of Plato's dialogues, and had taken to speaking in a rather annoying Socratic questioning fashion which was pissing Crystal off. So she decided to try it too, and quoted something from the dialogues which I was pretty sure didn't exist. Because Plato was never that vapid.

So I accused her of writing Philo fanfic. (On a sidenote, the idea of Philo fanfic is really funny hahaha. Imagine writing random Plato dialogues on various issues) But she just looked at me really weird, and said: "All fanfic is porn!"

Now obviously that is an unqualified something, or a something else something. Some sort of fallacy, but I forgot what. I have read some very sweet and well-written SSHG fanfics that do not include detailed descriptions of, uh, fornication between the main characters.

However, a rather significant portion of fanfic does contain some degree of, um, explicit sex between people. And being the nice innocent girl that I am, I try to skip over it, but in order to skip over it I have to know when it ends.

Oftentimes I just scroll down really fast, and scan the end of the paragraphs for some indication that the offending section has ended. However this is not a very foolproof method, and I occasionally do end up catching sights of bits and pieces which I would rather unsee.

Interestingly enough, some of these, ah, descriptions are really odd and not at all in a very porn-ish character. Not that I'm an expert or anything, but "and his sperm hit her cervix" somehow doesn't sound very arousing.

Unless of course you're talking about Bio fanfic, which would be quite odd too.

Anyway I shall end off abruptly again, because it is late and I want to sleep. I should really start working on more effective conclusions when I return from my trip.

There was, for one, the issue of nail polish and make up. Make up I was not so worried about, because, thank goodness, the school had shoved us all into compulsory make up lessons during Aesthetics in Sec 3. So while not being an expert in the craft, I was reasonably confident of being able to do something to my face without actually making myself look like a hideous clown.

The nails, however...

Sigh.

I have never been particularly confident with a brush, and sad to say my stint in SAP just kind of made whatever lingering confidence there was disappear. So especially when the brushes are tiny, and the canvases are my nails-- it was a Nightmare.

The nail polish I had somehow dug out from inside my mum's drawer was a rather, um, interesting shade of purple. It's the kind that you want to stare at-- okay I want to stare at-- but it's so dark it borders on being ahlian.

But more importantly, it's so dark you can't really make any mistakes with it, because as soon as it goes a little bit out of your nail, everyone will know. And everyone will laugh at you during FAM. And I'm sure Mr Lee and Mr Lim will come up with some particularly cutting and vitriolic comment-- vic-baiting seems to be one of Mr Lim's favourite pasttimes nowadays. (The worst thing of course is that I can't come up with any suitably nasty rejoinders because they're all so WEIRD. And they're teachers! You can't insult teachers. Much.)

So I asked my mum to help me with my hands, and she agreed. Except that she has bad eyesight too and is just as liable to go over the edges of the nails as I am, except that every now and then she stops to swear and rub at the edges with acetone on a cotton wool.

And so I began wondering if acetone was flammable. If inhalation of acetone could kill you. If it was an organic solvent. (I think it is, but I'm not sure) And then in the end my mum and I reached a compromise-- she would just paint, and then we'd clean off all the extras when she'd finished.

And then she painted the whole of my finger purple.

Sigh.

FAM is highly, highly, HIGHLY overrated. If I don't win a Brands' chicken essence hamper, I will be very, very annoyed.

It was supposed to be here for a week, while my mum's colleague's (the true owner of the dog) house underwent renovation, but somehow one week extended into two, and it has taken to following me around the house.

For someone who has lived in considerable solitude for the past few years, this is a somewhat novel, if rather disturbing experience. When I get up from the dining table and walk to the kitchen for a cup of water, it follows me there. And then it follows me back and situates itself under my chair.

I suspect I am playing a huge part in making the dog get obese, because I am feeding it copious amounts of food and yet letting it lead a rather sedentary lifestyle under my chair. You can infer that I don't really move around a lot.

But the worst thing is that I have actually started TALKING to the dog. Telling it "NO. DOWN. NO FOOD FOR YOU." whenever it puts its paws (with extremely sharp claws) on my leg and begs for food.

Tchah. As if it could understand me.

Sigh. Must resist temptation to start talking to it again.

I will be glad when I am able to return to solitude, as then I won't feel the urge to talk to things that obviously don't understand me.

Or who knows. I might just start talking to my mac or something like that.

But the one time I actually crash, Mr Ow takes it upon himself to buy everyone chocolate cupcakes from Awfully Chocolate. Which are Awfully Good.

So I spent half the time feeling bad for eating a cupcake despite not actually being a bona fide member of the class, and half the time feeling happy with my life.

We went through PEP assignment (I don't know what I'm going to do with mine-- I've only done existentialism this year and it looks like I'll either have to propose my own question or do Mr Lim's assignment. Which might end up being something like, uh, analyze A Clean Well-Lighted Place in the light of existentialism, or something like that. And then my head would explode because I never really GOT CWLP.) and Mr Ow reminded everyone to collect their books, and he realised that we were done for the day ._.

So to take up the rest of the time, he declared that he would "feed us" and promptly plied us with exotic Pocky and sweets from Sticky. I have finally discovered what Smiley Rock tastes like! Watermelon Rock and Grape Rock were pretty obvious, but Smiley was a bit more wtf.

And then we resumed plans for a PEP shirt for another year-- another year, another new plan-- and it's quite funny la haha.

--

I would just like to abruptly end off this post right here, because OotP is coming back on and I want to watch more Snape action.

I absolutely adore Snape's random acts of violence! (Gasp! Umbridge and Snape are like so cute together. Well not together-together, but you know, as in an antagonist-protagonist relationship and all.)

OKAY must go SNAPE SNAPE SNAPE!

Haha awesome I love the photos of the teachers. Especially the coupleshot which I think came from my fb album? Not sure but it looks familiar.

Yupyup I should go back to my philo essay, because I know I won't be able to fool Mr Lim by just crapping up something. Plus he could always go to Ms Picca, who would Know and then proceed to kill me.

As a sidenote, Mr Toh has sharp teeth!

And I was mighty freaked out when I was watching the class video and I suddenly saw Crystal pedoing on me while Xinyuan watched on in a passable imitation of Jacob Black. It was a mildly wtf moment.

OH YA AND MR LEE IS WEARING THE RAFFLES CREW JACKET IN THE GRADUATION BOOKLET. I AM SURE OF IT HAHAHA cos I just found mine today ._. I had given it up for lost and dead, but today, it returned to me from the depths of the class cupboard!

Speaking of Mr Lee, he sent me out on stage to hunt down mics. Strange to think that that was probably the last order I'd ever take from The Boss. And it was quite funny cos I swear I heard someone cheer "GO VICTORIA" which was, again, a mildly wtf moment because NO ONE CHEERS ON THE BACKSTAGE CREW.

Except during Isabelle's speech, where she explicitly mentioned AV, and we waved happily.

OKAY OKAY must stop getting distracted. I will do a proper Farewell Assembly post... someday.

"I'M NOT TECHNICALLY HERE TODAY."

Mr Lee glared at me.

For those who don't regularly hang around Mr Lee, it's because he's always on MC but yet somehow suspiciously manages to turn up in school, claiming that he's "not technically here today".

He reacted quite nicely to the stealing of his catchphrase, and repeatedly told me to look after myself and not die, to which Xinyuan coughed at rather discreetly. Well at least as discreet as Xinyuan can be-- which is to say not very.

--

Crystal and I planted ourselves outside Anderson today to wait for Ms Picca, because we wanted to see the sofas in the staff lounge. But even though we called her and called her and called her no one picked up the phone and we were left to wait outside dejectedly.

Mr Xu came, and we ambushed him to ask if he knew where she was. He gamely went in to have a look, but strangely never came out again. (How deep IS the staffroom actually omg) This has totally piqued my interest and I want to come back as a relief teacher so that I can someday explore the depths of the staffroom.

Mr Ho came out, and jokingly accused me of suspecting that he wouldn't remember my name. And he congratulated Crystal and I for getting stuff at CCA awards (we really spent most of the time gawking at the corporate video-- everyone loves the corporate video-- and spotting and waving madly at teachers we knew) Crystal was rather startled by how nice he was, and fished for a chengyu to describe him. I for one don't know why he's so nice either haha I remember the first time we had a COI with him I was positively obnoxious.

And then Mr Lim came out, and we asked him if he knew where Ms Picca was, and he very nicely went in to search for her. But luckily he didn't disappear like Mr Xu (who we never saw again. Well, not at least until much later) and I got to ask him about my Options assignment. Kind of cheat but since he said we COULD choose a short story, I chose a short story to write on for our assignment. I kinda feel bad for those who chose to pour through Macbeth, because... well, Hands is like, 5 pages long or something.

Then he asked us what the story was about, because he'd read it once but not READ it, and then I realised that I didn't know how to tell the story of Hands. Crystal managed it much better than I did, but together we realised that you can't really TELL the story of those post-modernist works.

For Hands, it's like... Wing Biddlebaum is accused of molesting a boy. And then he gets chased out of town. And he goes to Winesburg, Ohio, and... he hates his hands.

This elicited an "Uh huh... and then?" from Mr Lim, despite the fact that there just isn't an "and then?" in Hands. So he hates his hands! And he is depressed. The End.

At least Hands isn't as bad as things like, say, A Clean Well-Lighted Place.

So a guy walks into a cafe, and gets drunk, and then the waiter goes out, and is depressed. And he prays to nada.

Lolwth. Maybe I'm doing a very bad retelling of the stories-- storytelling has never been one of my strong points, but, yeah.

Meh laptop running out of battery.