Doing OK?

so fast another week's past. blogging again. Not much too say indeed, while life's become so much more tiring recently.

Doing OK?

I was perusing some of my fellow coursemates' recent blogs a while back, and found meself reading many thoughts not so close to the undergoing project, and think to myself, is it people caring less about what is at hand (well I only mean less)? Is it the way it should be to think and write about general stuff? Am I doing ok for just thinking and concerning my current task, which is filled with a big mess of detailed technical stuff? coz even disregarding my language ineffectivity, I cannot come up with any deep thoughts right now to write down even in chinese. Does this mean Im not mature enough to care about things that a grown up should always ponder in their everyday life? coz all that was filled in my mind for the past weeks is simply about the apps I am making. I would find myself so empty if I am to write abstract stuff supposedly drawn from the class. hmm, makes me being questioned myself: your can't be so simple a person, yea?

Well I think things are going fine. I'm just sometimes a bit fretful.

Pursuit for excellency

how to make a great piece of art? only my point of view: Only if you are pursuing excellency and perfection. No other way will do. A good example is a freak called Michaelangelo. Seeing his works will tell, that what kind of stunning splendor can be achieved by desire, and passion, and desire, and passion, and more. making an app can be an art, yet great art piece doesn't mean great profit, which leaves a choice for different kinds of people to make. Profits matters most of the time, yet often excellency also brings happiness. right now I just don't know what kind of person I could turn out to be in the context of the above scenario. Prior to all that concerning, however, I have to make meself a much better craftsman.

What else to learn?

honestly speaking I hate camping in COM1 overnight, coz recently I really feel somekind of energy falling short, which makes me quite low sometime (especially when suddenly bringing into to mind another blog or homework to be done..), but I obviously cannot leave my dear energetic partners spending the rest of the night without me. Well according to my observation, my team is the most hardworking one, with no other team I have witnessed been staying up every single day since we launched 2 weeks ago. I must say this exhaustive approach really gets me learn a lot, but to be honest so far what I have learned are those can be learned (by self learning) in other SE classes. I may not be aware of something, but I kinda feel there should be something else to learn. that cannot be teamwork, coz every project based course trains you with that. Self learning ability? maybe, but that's what I've already acquired, right now is to master it. and several other not-so-unique skills I will not mention here. Time management can be one. I heard people saying we're gonna learn a lot of things before and right after I took the course, so far I havn't touch many of them yet, I think. but I guess this is a gradual process, maybe I'm just not feeling it.

No this doesn't taste like first week

The first week was filled with struggling and frustrations.

and of course, is Very tiring.

our team's been working on the first assignment since Tuesday night.

progress has been made, yet not much, and I started to realize how limited our skills are to deal with all those obstacles we encountered so far. however, good thing is, these problems are all technical. With enough time put in, all technical problem can eventually be tackled. Now the problem comes, can I afford this "enough time"? there're only 11 days left now, and since the approximate total time we're gonna spend on tackling problms cannot be approximated (god knows how long it will take for me to figure out a trick to record user's last signout time e.g.),

the safest strategy we can employ right now is to chiong all the way to finish every task at hand, so that we secure as much time as possible for the next level's challenges.

Hopefully, we will have a working version of FB app by the end.

last time ex-3216 students talked with me, they seemed to convey such concept that this course never provide enough time for an app to be well developed, or even, gets developed. Well now I know this kind of statement has its cause, the pace is way beyond what has been common for NUS students when they get down to projectwork... Maybe that's how they expect us to learn. Learn it fast and learn it efficiently, deploy it fast and deploy it efficiently.

I have to get back to work now.

If you're stuck with some stupid looking problem for hours yet you dont have a slightest clue of what the heck has caused this bloody bloody and you've been googling this problem yet you dont have a slightest idea of what ppl up there are talking about regarding a seemingly same issue, how do you keep urself from going freaked out? well yeah baby I am experiencing this exclusive feeling rite now. maybe the course is a good place to learn controlling one's temper.

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"2 Cannibals are eating a clown, one turns to the other and asks "does this taste funny to you?"

--- Fallout 3

CS3216 -- examine my way to achievement

As this course will surely turn out to be tough, and heavy workload and frustrations can be foreseen laying ahead, it will be a great opportunity for me to examine the process of really achieving something great.

Last time my teacher told me something sound like this,'when you first gets to learn something u really want to learn, what drives you is passion, but passion is not gonna last forever as novel things become familiar and less attractive, when it dies down, so will your motivation to continue be gone with it, that's how many people drop out half way. the journey won't be happy and exciting all the time. Eventually what takes you to great achievement is perseverance.'

Now CS3216 is probably a good place for me to examine this. I'd like to see whether passion can take me that far towards the finish of my final project, or I would cool down somewhere in the middle to rely on perseverance for the rest of the journey. Either outcome would be good experience, and shall provide guidance in my future pursuit of goals and dreams. Of course, the premise is that I manage to go through the course and have done some acceptable work.

In the last lecture video, students in prof Pausch's CS3216-like course made really cool VR stuff that I thought only professionals in the field could make, that was inspiring and I hope I can produce something equally cool by the end of the course.