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I have moved! (again)

I’m not sure what possessed me to move from blogger to wordpress in the first place, but I’ve got sick of the formatting problems in wordpress.

If you blog with wordpress, you know there’s always issue with inserting photos and trying to type below it. And also weird spaces appear all over the place (line breaks).

So, good bye, good riddance.

My new blog URL is:

http://crazerk.blogspot.com

NUS AY 13/14 Semester 1 Module Review

This blog post has moved to http://crazerk.blogspot.com/2013/12/nus-ay-1314-semester-1-module-review.html

Sorry for the inconvenience!

Once again, I’m going to review the modules that I took this semester. 
If you have any questions, please send it to my email  atqhteo@gmail.com, or leave a comment below. Don’t worry, there are no stupid questions! I’ve received many emails asking me all sorts of questions. I reply all of them 🙂

The modules covered in this post:

PL4880G (Positive Psychology)
PL4880F (Addictive Behaviors)
GEK1063 (The Singlish Controversy)

(I only took 3 modules this semester as I’m working on my Honors Thesis, which is a year long project and worth 3 modules)

I’ll answer 5 questions for each: What is it about? How’s the workload? How difficult is it? Any miscellaneous tips/How was the exam? Should you take it?

If you want to see previous reviews for

• PC1323/GEK1510, GEM2901, PL4207, LSM1303, PL3231, click this link
• PC1325/GEK1508, MKT1003X, PL3252, PL3234, PH2211, click this link.
• GEk1519, SE1101E, PL3236, PL3233, PL3240, click this link.
• PL1101E, NM1101E, PH1102E, LAF1201, PL2131, click this link.
• For PL2132, PL3232, SSB2216 , PL3235, PH2110, click this link.

Do note that modules do vary across semesters, depending on which professor is taking it, so I will include the name of the professor for your benefit.

My relaxation technique

Once in a while, I have insomnia. I either can’t go to sleep, or I’ll wake up in the early morning and can’t go back to sleep. Sometimes I’ll try to fall asleep using some relaxation techniques, and this one is by far the most effective one. Hope it works for you! Don’t try it out as you’re reading otherwise you may fall asleep :p

 

Step 1) Establish a steady deep breathing pattern

There are two parts to this. First, your breaths should be belly-breaths. Meaning, you don’t expand your chest, but expand your stomach when you inhale. You should inhale deep and let the air expand your stomach. You can google it but this method of breathing basically takes in more oxygen and helps you to relax better.

Next is to establish the steady pattern. Count to 4 on an inhale, and 2 on exhale. 4, 2, 4, 2. Do this for about 10 consecutive breathing cycles (in and out), and you can move on to the next step.

After you stop being consciously aware of the 4-2 cycles, it’s ok to not be super strict (i.e. breathe in 4s, out 2s) but just try to maintain the deep breathing pattern which you have established, for the rest of the exercise.

 

Step 2) The Body Scan

Now, you’re going to start paying special concentrated conscious attention to each and every single small part of your body, one at a time. I usually do it from head to toe, you can do it from bottom up too.

Focus on one particular muscle/area (e.g. forehead), and consciously try to complete relax it. And I mean COMPLETELY. Like just feel all the tension in that spot drain out like water, and let a relaxing calm pass over it. You can imagine your spirit leaving your body at that part, but it’s important to totally absolutely relax it.

Once you have done one muscle, move on to the next. Don’t rush! Don’t skip small muscles! So this includes the tiny small eye muscles that connect your eyebrows, the sides of your temples, those behind your ears, your cheeks, your jaw, your upper and lower lip… move steadily but slowly and don’t leave out any part, doing the same relaxation technique.

If you have difficulty relaxing a particular part, try tensing/flexing it really hard for 3s, then release it. And let the relaxed feeling emeate….

After you have relaxed/given up control of a particular muscle/part, you should try not to move it at all for the rest of this exercise.

Do this for your whole body, until you have relaxed all ten of your toes.

 

Step 3) The House… and Beyond

Imagine you are in a grand big house. Make it as exquisite and grand as you’d like. You are at the top of a spiral staircase, with beautiful wooden banisters and all. Slowly walk down the steps, counting each step. There are twenty steps in total. Take in the beauty of the stairs, and while doing all these, maintain the deep breathing, the motionlessness of your body.

Once you’ve reached the bottom, the front door is in front of you. Open the front door, and exit into…. the most beautiful and luxurious garden you’ve seen in your life. Butterflies are flitting everywhere, the smell of freshly mown grass hits your nose, and you walk through the wonders of nature, feeling absolutely carefree and delighted. You hear birds chirping; maybe some even fly to you. It’s all up to you what to picture. Just imagine a scene of beauty and serenity.

You walk through the garden, and eventually reach a stream / waterfall. The lapping sounds of the gently falling water forms a nice soothing backdrop against the chirping birds and sounds of nature. You take in the wonderful scenery for a while … you can imagine further whatever else you want to see.

After you are done with this serene walk, it’s time to go back to your house.

You slowly plod back towards your grand big house. Visualize everything you’ve walked past earlier. Soak in the peace and calm of the moment.

You reach your house finally, and open the door. You see the flight of spiral stairs again. Wonderful ivory, fresh musk. You close the door, and begin walking up the stairs slowly, counting each step again. There are twenty steps in total.

When you reach the top, that’s the end of this exercise.

[Dreams] 2.4km, Winter, and the Epic Bunny Cat Fight

I was running practice laps for 2.4km, as if warming up for it. I was in my jeans. Then I started it and somehow I ran the first round in the wrong direction then I was forced to do it again

I went off.. to change into shorts, because well, its easier to run in shorts. But after I had changed… it was too late! The timing to take 2.4 was over. Zzz

Cut to next scene.. I was with my gf on a bus which somehow brought us from SG to Japan during winter. I had neglected to put on my winter wear and they were all in my luggage which was stowed in the baggage compartment below the bus.

I realized that I would have to be in my normal clothes for a good ten mins or sth before we could get our luggage when we alighted 😦

When we got off, we entered a building and were waiting around for something

Then I saw the most epic thing in my life… (even if it was just a dream)

 

 

I saw a cat and rabbit duke it out, no holds barred style, totally YouTube worthy kind of fight. 

The cat pounced on the rabbit but the rabbit was no meek animal as it wrestled and swiped the cat off. The rabbit managed to continually roll and maneuver off the cat.

All of us watching were actually cheering loudly with each successive sequence of pounce-wrestle-swipes-disengage
Finally the cat landed the killing blow – on one swift pounce, its fangs found the rabbit’s throat and it ripped out the rabbits windpipe. The cat rolled to the side, with the windpipe dangling out of his mouth. The fight was over. There was a collective ‘ohhhhhh’ when this happened.

Then I woke up. And felt a pang of regret for not videoing down that epic fight. Then realized it was just a dream.

Snowball

No, this is not a blog post about how much I love the snow or throwing snowballs (I do love these two though). This is a blog post about how the tiniest and seemingly most insignificant events and decisions in my life seem to just snowball into the most amazing and wonderful things.

1) Decision to play drums

I was actually on the visuals team for my church’s worship team, and I was doing visuals during worship practice one day when the rest were having a discussion about the lack of new drummers in the worship team. Having seen me bang around on the drums before (for fun), they asked me to show them what I could do.

Snowballed to…

I am now regularly playing drums for my church’s worship team. I can’t say my skill level has improved much over the years because I don’t play regularly enough neither have I had any form of proper coaching so. Still pretty cool considering how I had never imagined myself playing drums before that fateful worship practice.

 

2) Decision to go for Psych Camp 2010

If you knew me before I went into uni, you would know that I am totally not the rah rah type. I’m chillax and self-conscious, and not the go-for-camp-and-lead-cheer type. Thus I never had the intention to go for any orientation camp when I was entering NUS in 2010.

However, for some tiny reason that I don’t even remember, I ended up signing up for Psychology Camp last minute (like literally the week before the camp, and probably got accepted because they have almost no guys)

Snowballed to…

Apart from the great seniors who I got along with well and still kept in contact with, I met the love of my life, szehong, in the camp. It wasn’t like we saw each other and Cupid shot us both too – that happened later on, and is another story for another time.

 

3) Decision to go for Arts Orientation Camp 2010

I remember who contributed to this decision – bestie was asking me if I wanted to go O week, and I thought oh well why not.

Snowballed to…

Two years later, I have been a counsellor at 2 Arts Camps and made many many new friends whom I would not have known otherwise. Got to know Nella + Wilbur who I took many modules with and hang out with occasionally. Awesome sauce.

 

4) Decision which almost cost me $2000

This was related to my brief involvement in the world of MLM. The tiny decision I made was to follow my friends to their office just to ‘check things out’ since I was pretty free.

It snowballed to…

If I had not gone along with them, I would never have committed and got myself into all that mess. I would never have put in $2000 of my money and gone through all that headache after that. If I had just decided to go meet bestie again after the meeting with my friends, I would never have had this life lesson.

I chronicled my experience here: Part 1 and Part 2.

 

5) Decision to go for Union Camp 2012

I didn’t even think about going for Union Camp up until after Arts Camp 2012. I learnt that one of my freshies from Arts Camp was going for Union Camp and somehow at that point of time I thought it would be a good idea to go for another camp, I decided to sign up last minute for Union Camp

It snowballed to…

A great few days of meeting yawen, bao, lixia, luomin, and one of the most honest HTHTs I’ve ever had(which included an ego boost :p). Still keep in contact with those girls and glad to be part of their circle of friends.

 

6) Decision to go for New England Games

I was in the US, and my friend Vince asked me if I wanted to go for this Singapore gathering thing on the day we were supposed to live for New York. I didn’t even want to go until the last minute when I had no other plans to leave earlier for NY, and decided to go for it.

It snowballed to…

I finally met the Singaporeans in Boston, after being there for 2 months and not even knowing them. Got to know Aldea, who pulled me into the freshie clique by asking me along with them multiple times, including a trip to NY for the entire Thanksgiving. Also got to know the other Year2s who are an AWESOME bunch of people and had multiple fun outings and dinners and even my first halloween party.

 

7) Decision to go for pingpong

I wanted to join some CCA while in the US, and having heard of the tabletennis club I decided to go for that.

It snowballed to…

Turns out that my roommate played pingpong too and he came along, and played many close games against him. Also met Peter at pingpong, who turns out to be probably the most awesomest person I met in the US.

That’s him there on the right. He surprised me with Cheesecake Factory on my birthday when I barely knew him (like met him maybe 3-4 times during pingpong and talked then? bumped into him several times? ) What human being is so kindhearted and sweet one!!??! omg hope for humanity.

Through him, got to know many other people too, including melody (the girl next to him) who is just really fun and nice and she loves the Singaporean accent for some reason.

Hung out with Peter a lot, such as dinnering, gymming, playing cards. Damn I’ll miss him. I don’t care how gay this sounds.

 

8) Decision to watch Survivor

When I was in Sec 1 or 2, I began to watch this show called Survivor, and also texted my church friend Christabel about it and discussed it frequently.

It snowballed to…

10 years of awesome friendship later, Christabel is my bestie and it’s funny how our friendship started off through discussing shows and although we don’t discuss shows anymore (I blame her, she’s not the TV buff she was before), we’re still close as peas in a pod.

And of course, multiple seasons of a great TV franchise :p

 

9) Decision to trade a red paperclip

One fine day in 2005, I decided to trade a red paperclip I had for a fish-shaped pen.

It snowballed to…

Over 10 trades and a year later, I am now a proud owner of a 2-storey farmhouse.

Ok fine this didn’t happen to me, but it did happen to Kyle Macdonald.

 

Asian Food Trail !

The girlfriend suggested an ‘Asian Food Trail’ as I was going to the US soon, and I would probably miss Asian food. So… away we go!

Laksa Yong Tau Foo @ Cineleisure Koufu ($4+)

This is one of my favourite YTFs – they always reheat the fried stuff to make it crispy/warm again, and their ingredients are all large sized, so it’s well worth the cost! The laksa this time tasted a bit salty/oily so it wasn’t as good, but it was better the previous time I tried it.

Fitness Journal #3 – The Weight

One of my goals for working out was to put on weight – the initial target was 70kg, but that seemed unrealistic so I lowered it to 65kg. But in actuality, I don’t really care about the weight. I just want to look bigger. And stronger. And more muscular.

[S] How to Remember my Blog URL

You may think it’s difficult to remember the number of Zs in my blog URL. Is it alanz? alanzz? alanzzzzzzz? Why the heck do I even put Zs?

Well, I don’t have a quirky nickname like mrbrown or xiaxue or anything, (my gaming nick is probably too hard to remember) and I want to retain some individuality in the URL (and not like averageboi194.wordpress or something).

SO. It’s very simple.  How many letters does my name have?. A-L-A-N.

Four!

That means 4 Zs.

There we have it. alanzzzz

My first Starcraft 2 LAN

Today was the first ever Singapore LAN and it was held at Mystery Box Gaming, organized by Frogmite! (and HDPhoenix)


Disclaimer: This blog post has no pictures so if just words aren’t the kinda thing for you, you can stop reading. 

(If you went for the event and you’re wondering who I was, I was wearing the black shirt with the big Zerg  insignia on the front)

Prelude 
I was pretty apprehensive about going for this event, as it would be the first time I’m meeting online friends/personas face to face! I even had dreams about it the night before >< Also, I didn't know how receptive the people would be, whether there would be much interaction, etc. 
And also, how the heck do you introduce yourself in these kinda things? Lolol. It feels weird to say ‘hi, I am Crazerk’ instead of my real name.


Three Random Thoughts From The Event 
1) People have cliques
It was odd being there as I had virtually no friends/cliques. I had one RL friend there but he was with his Eve clanmates, and then there was the ‘top GM clique’, basically the top players like Rev, Han, ice (can’t recognize the rest) who know each other from playing together so much and from the many tournaments. There were also little congregations, like Drake and Proann from their iRL clan.

Thus I was just drifting around like a vagrant, spending the bulk of my standing-up time behind Revenant watching him play. He’s always been my favourite SG player, just because he’s very well-mannered, humble and he’s Zerg! 
It was also a cool experience to have people standing behind ME watching me play, and you can hear them mutter-narrate stuff that’s happening and you feel amazing when you do good stuff  


2) Offline Events Are Real Tough
I brought my own mouse and headphones just for the fun of it, not like I expected to beat those GMs in the tourney and hence need optimal performance or anything.

The first thing I realized was how difficult it was to get used to the new setup – the new scroll speed/sensitivity (have to basically go configure and unless you are a seasoned offline veteran who has memorized your settings, you’re going to have to adapt to something slightly different) the bigger screen, the different keyboard.

THE KEYBOARD. It really makes a huge difference, maybe more so than the mouse! Why? Because mouse(s) don’t really differ THAT much apart from those that have different ergonomic designs. (Ok I’m probably horribly wrong but who cares)
But the major differences between keyboards is – the Ctrl key and number keys seems to be at different places on different keyboards.
Thus I was having alot of trouble hotkeying stuff and kept messing up hotkeys because the keyboard was slightly different.

This experience made me realize that it is possible that players play like 10% worse at LAN events if they don’t bring their own keyboard/mouse!
Well, of course there are those that practice on poorer platforms (e.g. ProAnn who told me he practised on laptop, so he played better there instead) so somehow perform better, but assuming someone who has a decent rig at home, spends hours practising and being so familiar with his own setup – he is likely to perform poorer in an entirely new environment.

– [Dont click this if you dont want to know a particular result from the tourney] –

3) Frogmite is a pretty big fella
Ok I couldn’t think of a 3rd point so this is it. He’s big! At one point he grabbed me by my shoulders and shook me for fun and I swore he could have lifted me and spun me on his finger as well.

My Games 
My first opponent was aLtHan, woopey doo. I obviously didn’t expect to win and just was playing for the experience.
I still remember our conversation before the game:

crAzerk: “Hey ready for our game?”
aLtHan: ‘Hang on, let me warm up ‘
crAzerk : “You can use our game as a warmup!”

In Game 1 I opened 15 hatch and he went 14/14, and I defended his early lings terribly and lost a few Drones. He expanded off that and after some trading of ling/banes he was magically 20 drones ahead or something like how GMs always are and then does a Roach timing. 
I defended it with spines and my own Roaches which popped, but he had a superior upgrade + economy advantage, so he just played around with me (for his warmup I guess) for awhile before killing me eventually.

In Game 2 I opened 15 hatch again and held off his early push much better. He went for 21 hatch with banes I believe, and after being a retard and running all my lings up his ramp for some unknown reason and losing them all to a baneling, he counterattacks and kills me.


In the loser’s bracket, I faced Warfest, a Masters League Protoss. I tried out ling-infestor and with my amazing micro I more or less killed nothing when he pushed out finally after turtling on 3 bases with a +3 zealot heavy / archon / stalker/ sentry army. Forcefields + Zealot/archon = Zergling Bloodbath.
I silently cursed Protoss under my breath for being an A-move race as he marched on and I pitifully rallied some units to poke away at his Protoss ball and finally surrendered when I had let him kill enough buildings.
(On watching the replay my macro was terrible and inferior to his too so even if I had decent micro it wouldn’t have made a difference)
(loser’s brackets were Bo1)

Final Thoughts 
It was pretty fun seeing faces that I’ve only seen in photos, and putting a face to some names. Got to see ProAnn (who gave me some tips and played a game with me in which he crushed me with Mothership) , derpy (who more or less ignored me because he had his friends ;( ), Frogmite (who warmly shook my hand when he realized who I was when I introduced myself) 
Revenant probably looked at me several times but had no idea who I was so,  

Kudos to Frogmite for running this event!