Random bits and pieces in my daily life.

Prologue: Ahh, March. The climax month of the second semester with most of the courses already in it’s last stretch and huge amount of assignment deadlines along the way til April. There’s no room to make any huge mishaps now. A few more tsunami waves are expected to come so brace yourself, everyone!

Passport to Excellence, the latest PR campaign by USM highlighting the vision and missions of university packaged into a single book. The booklet itself was very intricate in design down to the usually monotonous colour with gold pattern as well as the rounded edges of the book typical of an actual passport. I think this booklet will be launched when the coming APEX batch in 2010/2011 entered USM and I think all of them will have to pledge to this book beside Surat AkuJanji. lol The little purple book!

Anyway, I got this from HEPP a day before Meeting of Student Leaders with MQA (Malaysian Qualification Agency) auditor at 10 March 2010 (Wednesday). And yeah, for some reason, I was chosen as one of the 10 student leaders to meet with MQA Auditor even though BATI Club is really what I call a kelab picisan with little or no significant activities that actually can contribute to USM’s vision and mission. The meeting of student leaders with MQA leader is actually one of a whole series of meetings conducted by MQA’s auditor to gauge how far the university’s progress and performance encompassing every single detail such as academic curriculum, governance, provision of service and such with different sector of people in university. According to one of the Encik Norzuki and Encik Mansor HEP, USM’s VC’s Prof Dzulkifli had to face the WHOLE MQA Auditing team, consist of various representatives/experts from other university as well as the ministry so we the student leaders considered as lucky because we only need to meet with two of them. The two MQA auditors for this session is the former VC for UMS and Prof Peter, formerly in UPM but now teaching in IMU. The student leaders consisted of various types of clubs such as Anak Negeris (AMLIS Perlis and PERMATA Terengganu is chosen), Sciences (Industrial Technology and forgot another one), volunteerism type (Green Lung, AIESEC, Secretariat Perpaduan Malaysia) as well as the MPP (Wafi and another girl which I didn’t remember). The whole session went on quite cordially but from time to time the auditors asked stinging question especially Prof Peter. He asked for our opinions regarding the cohesion of different racial groups in campus and he did mentioned about that certain activities/clubs are dominated by certain sector/groups of people and the CHINESE are not exactly willing to participate any official university activities. Personally, these kind of stuff are the very last thing that I care about but I was rebutted by Prof Peter when I mentioned about Malaysia is still a young nation relatively and it is still a long way before the vestige of race will be gone. He said that now that the university is already in the APEX programme in which its core thing is about Accelarated and are we as a student leader ready to switch our mindset into a higher gear or just hanging on by the notion that it is still a long way to go? To be honest, I was stumped but other student leaders come in to save as well. But in the end everything went on smoothly and Prof Peter is genuinely curious about BATI as well when he asked about what did we do in BATI. (BATI’s standard answer: We are exposed to the philosophy of translation through different theories and approaches and while our language focused on BM and BI only, the knowledge we acquired can be implemented on other language as well. Did I answer this correctly?) It was definitely an once in a lifetime experience by a stroke of chance.

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It’s almost certain that any turn you take will lead to another interesting bits of history if you are around old Georgetown and here’s one of them somewhere near Love Lane: 鲁班庙 or The Chinese Carpenter’s Guild with the famous carpenter LuBan as their patron saint/deity. It looked a little rundown and secluded from the bustling corner but the temple featured a very intricate piece of woodwork hanged from the ceiling which I forgot to take its picture down. Went there last Saturday (13 March)

Here’s an interest bits from the pre-independace day: Certificate of Appreciation awarded to the Carpenter Guild by the Municipal Council of Georgetown for their participation in the Centenary Celebration of GTMC in year 1957.

And here’s Georgetown Municipal Council’s crest pre-restructured into MPPP era. I always found myself intrigued by the design of old British heraldic crest design during colonial times. I am still where I can get a good quality picture of the old Kuching Municipal Council’s crest. MBKS museum should have I think. But luckily I can get the picture of Kuching Rural District Council’s crest at 7th Mile market there.

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Got this mobile phone strap trinket thingy from Tuan Syed Yusof (LHP456). He bought it when he for a two week business trip representation USM to China (HongKong – Shanghai – Hangzhou – ShiJiaZhuang – Beijing). Apparently, SOLLAT is interested to open a language institute in China. Looks like everyone is going to China just to grab any piece from the humongous market potential there. If this business trip is a success, I wonder do they wanna offer Bahasa Malaysia course or not. Then we BATIan have a job!

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On 16 March 2010 (Tuesday), MPD Indah Kembara organized a blood donation drive at Foyer DK U and for me after missing our so many chances for donating blood in the previous semester (time constraint and/or haven’t gone more than 3 months yet), it is the golden opportunity to go for another blood donation. And of course I succeeded. However, I got a revelation of my own when I stand on the weighing scale: I GAINED WEIGHT OMFG. My weight is currently standing at 92kg and there’s no sign for it to go down in near future OMG. At the same time, PooBee lose weight instead and she was just borderline pass for donating blood with her weight standing at 45kg. Ish. Two of her equals to one me WTF. Anyway, we were side by side to each other when we are donating blood and being us, this means more chance to take photo. Pretty hard though to take picture with one hand because there’s a needle piercing into the artery of the other hand.

My current tally: 5 times. Need to wait for another 3 month before I am officially fit to donate. There’s no stopping for donating blood and you will always want to do it again after doing it the first time. Donate blood and save a life.

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Went to McDonald TWICE for the past one week. Actually it has been a long time since I went to McDonald because not much of class for this semester so I always go back to my room after class. The outcome for these two trip: I can feel my waistline is kinda growing…LOL.

First time for this week: 16 March 2010 (Tuesday). Around 8pm plus after I had my dinner over AB cafe at Ivory Plaza.

Kedua-dua pendalangnya – si burung YenPheng and si burung SzeSze. Mereka berdua ini berjaya menarik saya datang berjauhan dari AB cafe kat Ivory Plaza sebelah Bukit Gambir ke McDonald Sungai Dua selepas mencuri perhatian saya dengan bercadang menjamu makan malam di McDonald. Selepas berceloteh kat Facebook menggunakan BM sambil mengetengahkan lagi idea untuk datang ke McDonald, akhirnya saya pun termakan dengan tarikan tersebut lalu beredar terus dari AB Cafe ke McDonald Sungai Dua.

Habuannya – McDonald Chocolate Sundae sahaja kerana saya baru sahaja menjamu makan malam sebelum saya beredar ke McDonald.

Second time this week: 17 March 2010 (Wednesday) *yikes back to back!*

Culprits: The lunch gang with the suggestion by Chan PooBee. Actually, her original intention is to order a takeout from McDonald for lunch because the rest of them already had their lunch earlier at Subaidah. As the discussion goes, it end up as all of us going to McDonald together. And oh why do we gathered in one of the tutorial room at C24 anyway? Aside from PooBee (who came later in noon), all of us have HBT305 private group discussion earlier in the morning (SzeSze and I in Academic Text Group, SheiHan, MingWei, YenPheng and Lawrence in popular text group.) And after the HBT305 private group meeting’s over, the rest of us continued with other matter, with the everyone in this picture doing their LHP456 panel discussion planning while me and SzeSze doing our own work for HBT305.

But we wrapped up our work earlier so both of us need to wait for them to finish their discussion. Here’s Birdie trying to Facebook with the ever discriminating USMhotspot.

And me camwhoring again.

And then we settled down in McDonald, munching away more junk food. By the way, it has been too long since the last time we visited McDonald that they (or at least McDonald Malaysia) went through rebranding exercise with new packaging and such!

For example, here’s the new updated Big Mac’s box.

Spicy Chicken McDeluxe. Notice all these packaging comes bilingually in BM and English.

And here’s the French Fries box, big fries and regular fries. Upon close inspection however, we discovered a rather huge and novice flaw in one of the packaging…

I think the mistake here is very obvious: It should be written as "selected" instead of “select'’ in the English tagline. Explain yourself please, McDonald Malaysia! *Edit: Peter pointed out that it's correct so I checked Oxford Advance Learner Dictionary for clarification. Turned out IT IS CORRECT. Select can be used as it is as an adjective for a noun. Guess we all learn something everyday! Sorry McDonald.*

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18 Mac 2010 (Thursday): It has been a while since the last time that I had actual dinner at Istimewa so feeling adventurous, I ordered Chicken Maryland…for a whopping RM9.50. ZOMG I had been splurging my money away on so many foods this week!

More binging and unbridled spending of money in the upcoming post!

Epilogue: Deadline, deadline and more deadline for the next two weeks. Hopefully the 平安 trinket on my mobile phone actually can bring me some luck and peace to go through this saat genting. 希望一切平安无事，安然无恙的结束这一个学期。来吧！最后的冲刺！