RMIT Diary

It has been a while since my last entry when I had a flu. It’s over, yet not completely. I am feeling much better now. The weather change this afternoon, perhaps, caused some bad effects on my health again. And right now, I feel like getting sick again.

Have bought a new shoulder rest (for my violin), and it’s quite a pleasure to use. It was my teacher who noticed my left shoulder being too high due to the old, spoiled shoulder rest. Just a minor change brought about a significant improvement on my playing, and I’m happy with it.

I also bought a new monitor for my desktop PC, doubling my working space. It was a total boost in productivity. With two monitors, I now use one for coding, the other for reference materials, no more switching back and forth between applications. This is really nice and I would definitely recommend everyone getting another monitor for your daily use provided that your graphic card supports multiple output (my card has support for up to 3 monitors ).

Bad news, I am running out of storage. The 160GB HDD I purchased along with this computer one year ago is now almost filled up (only a few GBs left). Initially, I didn’t think that far about the need to store media. I thought the desktop is for processing-heavy task only. My laptop (250GB HDD) is still OK with the storage, but maybe this won’t last long. And I’m considering getting a 2TB HDD whenever possible (maybe next month).

These days, I am having a review of functional programming with ANSI C as I work on a project involving creating plugin for Pidgin (the most popular open source chat client). This recalls my old days when all the code was in Pascal (another functional programming language). After all, ANSI C is still an elegant language to learn and use. Some of my friends said it’s useless for OOP. In fact, OOP with C is not about the language itself but rather about the way of thinking. And while writing this entry, I am reading an ebook about Object Oriented Programming with ANSI C. It’s how we think about it, not just how we write it (the code).

My classes are fine, hope to get high scores as usual. Fortunately, IT students in my semester don’t have any mid-term exams. However, I personally consider this worrying since such exams are chance for us to “try out” the difficulty of the final exams, without the risk of failing.

It’s bedtime. Cygwin and some movies are supposed to be ready tomorrow.

The headache is almost over yet my body temperature still remains high. When I woke up this morning, it was 39 census degree. Living alone and being in bed with a flu is really worrying.

It’s 38 census degree now, the medicine works.

Recently, when logging into the school’s WebEMS, you will get either (or both) of the following screens.

Internet Explorer:

or in Firefox:

Although the website seems to be down, it’s not. Here’s what happened.

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It came finally; and no one likes this fact. The influenza created such a heavy atmosphere on campus. Students skip their classes. Many people wore a mask today. The school is about to be closed temporarily until next Monday, as far as I know.

People start to panic about the situation. For the first time in my student life the door to SOS Clinic is filled with a long queue of students and staff members waiting for a check. In just 6 hours, more than 300 medical masks have been distributed. And Health is now obviously the first priority in the school.

I had a check this afternoon, just to ensure that everything was OK. Negative. Great!

[…]

Just the beginning…

Minutes ago, I received the email from Steve Paris regarding temporary closure of SGS Campus. It’s 6:30 now; and our beloved staff doesn’t seem to care about the working hour anymore.

The threat is so close. And everyone should be ready.

Take care!

Update (24/7/2009): The closure has been extended by one week; all activities will be back to normal on Monday 3rd of August.

I have a terrible habit, that I pay too much attention to the technology gadget in hands. That habit, of course, is not something to be proud of. Just want to say that I shouldn’t have any piece of technology in hand, otherwise I may get addicted.

This is also one reason why I don’t have a compact camera, for everyday occasions. It would be much nicer to have my friends take the photos for me; and since the photos are in their cameras, they have a copy, thus might eventually think about me whenever they look at the pictures.

Just a joke…

To be honest, I prefer writing as a means to save the feelings and emotions. No matter how big a photo is, it is just a set of pixels in digital format. You may agree with me that there isn’t such a picture that looks exactly the same to the reality. Meanwhile, writing is all about imagination, where you can think about the event, and let the moments live on in a more lively way. There are things that a picture cannot express, such as the feeling of the guy behind the camera. Needless to say, those feelings are the most worthy things to be saved.

You need to be right there at the right moment to take the picture, and you might delete it immediately afterward because of its not-so-good quality. But for a personal piece of writing, there isn’t such a thing called bad-writing. It’s all about your feelings and emotions. And though you don’t write immediately at that moment, you write about what really means to yourself as a whole, not just a fraction of what your eyes can see (the pixels).

I don’t mean that photography is not good, yet it’s not to be done every day blindly. Live is much more meaningful than what a photo can explain. It might looks real, but emotion is the one thing that is stronger. I find it in writing; you might find it in Arts. How we do it, however, is not important. The key point is how to save the meaning in its fullest form possible.

That’s my point of view. How about yours?

Thoai, Nguyen Van – 1:55AM 21/07/2009

PS: If I had good mid-ranged DSLR camera, maybe I would take a few pictures. However, I don’t see a point taking photos every day (unless it’s your major). I personally don’t really enjoy using compact cameras as their quality is not satisfying compared to the moment that could potentially be missed when looking at the little LCD screen all the time.

Some things we don’t talk about

Rather do without and just hold the smile

Falling in and out of love

Ashamed and proud of, together all the while

You can never say never

While we don’t know when

But time and time again

Younger now than we were before

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This semester so far:

• Business Club: proactive (as a department manager)
• Event Club: idle (no announcement so far)
• Design Club: inactive (time table doesn’t fit club’s schedules)
• Music Club: normal (purely entertainment activities after class time)

I find the school’ bandwidth limit unreasonable. This afternoon, I downloaded the OpenSUSE DVD which is 4.3 GB big. However, the total bandwidth allocation for each student is just 5GB per month and it’s obvious that I only have about 500 MB left for the rest of the month (or maybe I exceed the bandwidth allocation already). WOW! HOW CAN I SURVIVE?

Although I managed to get out of the school without going through the proxy, the standard bandwidth allocation, to an IT student like me, doesn’t seem fit at all.

This is just an example about the bandwidth consuming of a regular IT student. I strongly argue that putting the same cap on every student in the school is simply not the right thing to do.

If every technical-majored student, namely B.Design, B.IT and BIS ones, only needs as little bandwidth allocation as the others, there would have been nothing to complain.

But…

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It has been over a week since the last entry. It seems that I’m starting to get the sense-of-writing again. Unfortunately, I don’t feel so comfortable to write in Vietnamese anymore. Maybe almost a year studying at an English speaking university caused some negative affects on my (written) Vietnamese.

These days, especially after moving the new house and living alone, I found out that there were some days when I don’t even use a single Vietnamese word. My classmates now use English whenever possible and we’re getting use to it. I’m not sure whether this is good or bad, yet I really miss my Vietnamese. And well, perhaps everything comes at a cost.

My student life is still busy as usual. The very first assignment this semester has been done and three more are about to come. The “academic” part of my life doesn’t seem to be a challenge. Currently, I’m rather busy with the club as a new manager, yet I think I’m getting ready to the new role quick.

My calendar is almost full with very little space for new things. It seems that I’m running into the edge. Even with a part-time job, I’m still playing around with 3 clubs and lots of activities. Some of my friends say that I look too busy but I feel that this is just the “right” workload for me to self-motivate.

[Bedtime]