We’ve successfully shifted servers from Webhostingbuzz to DreamHost, after the former kept going down for an hour a day according to uptime reports.

As part of the latter’s anniversary promotions, we managed to get 80% off our first year’s subscription, so it’s US$24 for the first 12 months of hosting. Steve gets his much-coveted shell access, everyone gets more space, and hopefully our email users get a bit more reliability. The transfer seems to have gone without much trouble, and everything worked on first try the morning after the DNS propagated to our Singapore servers… we’re still waiting for the DNS transfer to DreamHost, and their support isn’t as amazingly great as everyone mentioned (people’s general enthusiasm could, of course, be explained by their referral program), but things look like they work.

Good enough. Back to your regularly-scheduled chickens…

It’s been at least four years since I’ve had to write 12-page fuzzy papers. As it stands, I have 24 hours to write this damn thing on “creative and critical thinking”, and I’m out of practice from my days of being able to generate a page of reasonably intelligible nonsense every hour. Also, I’ve only written one page in the last four days.

Ooh, the excitement! It’s been so long since I’ve had so much fun procrastinating and then having to regret it on the day before an assignment is due.

Remember I was compraining about how my NIE tutor for Communication Skills couldn’t pronounce the letter ‘h’ correctly the other day? (She’d pronounced it “hedge” on several occasions, annoying me to no end.)

So during today’s class on phonetics, this same tutor showed two pronunciations of the letter ‘h’ on the board — ‘hedge’ and ‘aych’ — then proceeded to explain that the latter was the correct pronunciation. Wait, what?! She knows the right pronunciation? Of course she would, she teaches communication skills. In fact, she explained it like this (I paraphrase): “So remember, class: the letter hedge is pronounced without a hedge in front.”

Whu?!? Oh my poor exploding brain.

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Observations from two weeks of edjamacator edjamacation (I mean, NIE):

• The Teaching of Math class is a fucking nightmare. Not only is it 6 units (out of 21 for the semester), but the tutor for my group teaches us like we’re secondary-school kids. She even called for volunteers to complete, on overhead transparencies in front of the class, worksheets on negative numbers. Negative fucking numbers! Gah! Furthermore, the tutor’s well-versed in dodging questions, the way one would when trying to avoid answering questions posed by schoolchildren — ask her anything, and she’ll happily repeat whatever she’d just said in the last five minutes in order to deflect the question. “Isn’t this another way of answering the question?” “The way of answering the question is… [repeats whatever she just taught]” Sorely underdeveloped sense of humour, laughs at her own jokes, complete fucking tool. Ahhh! Stop hurting my brain! Please!
• The Communications Skills class is nearly as bad, but we only meet once a week for two hours. The content is at least vaguely useful, but the tutor’s humourless and boring. And I’m sorry, but if you want to criticise Singaporeans for the widespread mispronunciation of “th” as “t” (“three” as “tree”, for example), the least you could do is not pronounce the letter “h” as “hedge”.
• The Educational Psychology textbook, rewritten for a Singaporean context by a NIE prof, blows major balls. Not only does it have no index and a sorely under-represented glossary, but it slips in and out of its original American and revised Singaporean contexts carelessly, haphazardly skipping case studies for Singaporean schools where inconvenient. A pain to read for something so potentially interesting (though, really, I’ve forgotten how to read textbooks without equations). This is a criticism of the textbook, not the class — the latter is remarkably bearable.
• The remaining classes (Teaching of Physics, Use of IT in Education) are, for the moment at least, not overly offensive. That could be because the respective tutors happily went and cancelled classes at random, or did not schedule make-up classes for the National Day holiday.

• Step 1: Move into on-campus housing to avoid the evil temptation of nearly 3 kilograms (01 x 400g, 08 x 300g) of Cadbury chocolate bars (flown in from England — the good shit, like how pot dealers might tell you) sitting in the fridge at home.
• Step 2: Utilise free time to go running in the evening around the nice quiet campus.
• Step 3: After two days of step 2, go for humongous sushi buffet and get rather sick.

Me = dumbass

I’ve moved on-campus. The room’s big and spartan and I feel like we could fit a car between the two beds, if necessary. Today was the first day of classes, mostly introductory fare and largely bearable despite the overly long two-hour lectures.

School (er, “work”, loosely defined) doesn’t feel like anything big and new and terrifying yet — maybe it’ll all sink in when a few of my best friends start leaving in the coming weeks. Aiy, life moves on way too quickly.

Just a quick entry to sum up the odds and ends I’d been intending to write about but kept getting distracted by a rapid succession of Veronica Mars episodes:

• I hadn’t noticed until the latest iPhoto update broke something, but Keyword Assistant for iPhoto has been updating pretty regularly. Luckily, the author has a RSS feed (here) for updates — that’s normal enough, the feed goes into my NetNewsWire list with Adium, ecto, Saft, etc. What’s particularly cool, however, is how the Keyword Assistant feed actually uses enclosures (normally used for delivering podcasts) to include the actual software being updated. Hence, any reader checking their feed with a compatible newsfeed program can easily download the updated program like they would a podcast (instead of “our program’s been updated, click here to go to a page to download it”, as is usually the case). Coolness! Blindingly obvious, when you think about it, and an amazing use of RSS technology.
• The rest of the life: I cleared out my desk at work on Thursday — not something one gets to do often, hopefully, much less in one’s fifth week of work. Granted, it’s because my school attachment had finally ended. At least now the kids I was teaching will resume getting a real education and not my unprepared nonsense.
• NIE term proper starts next week (after this week’s orientation-ish activities). The timetable is nice and loose, with big gaping four-hour holes between classes perfect for afternoon naps. No free days, though, but only one day starts at 8.30, so I think I can get by without overdosing on too much caffeine. (He says now, unsuspectingly…)
• I’ll be moving on-campus sometime soon… maybe this weekend, or earlier. Since I’ll be rooming with good ol’ Mal/Kekdil/Block, there’s really no reason not to make your way to the remotest corner of Singapore just to visit. If you have a car, anyway. If not, uhh, you can sleep on our floor and risk getting fined $7 a night, unless you’re also living in the Hall, in which case we’ll all get evicted. It’s a real rule (see 7c).

Back to more TV.

So, as previously mentioned, I’d been assigned to the school my dad’s teaching at for my pre-NIE School Experience.

I didn’t make any particular effort to hide this fact from anyone, but my dad hid the family photos on his desk the day before I arrived, triggering some suspicion from a colleague (who happens to be an ex-student of my mom’s, and I do resemble my mom quite a bit). Somewhere along the way, though, most of the staff have figured it out. It’s not very hard when we arrive in the same car every morning, and I sometimes drive my dad’s car home if my mom needs a ride somewhere (although a colleague did ask him, with a bit of concern, “Did you see that trainee teacher take your laptop and drive your car off?!”).

Now, however, some of the students seem to know too — especially this one kid who works at his family’s restaurant nearby (highly recommended, it’s that cze char / seafood restaurant at one end of the block where Casuarina Roti Prata is). He must’ve seen me there with my dad before or something.

Earlier this week, he randomly asked me: “Are you Mr Soon’s son?”

“What other surname do you expect my father to have?”

It’s my third-to-last day at the school, though, and an altogether rather pleasant experience (apart from the late-night lesson planning due to my usual procrastinating habits). At the very least, it’s been quite educational, and maybe NIE classes won’t be so boring if I have real experiences to relate them to.