30 Day Challenge for February

I waited quite a while for Blogger to role out its new 'draft template', a new UI loaded with better features, to post this update on my next 30 Day Challenge but I guess it may not be happening anytime soon.

My 30 Day Challenge for February was 'to walk home daily from college'. Since February 2011 has only 28 days, I began this challenge on the 31st of January and extended it to the 1st of March. This challenge would have been a 20 day challenge because theres no school on Saturdays and Sundays, but I did my walking on weekends too and completed all 30 days.

The distance from my school to my block is about 2 miles which roughly takes me about 35mins to cover (Approx speed = 3.5mph). With the help of a walking calorie calculator I was found out that I burned an average of 186 calories per day. This means that in 30 days, I burned roughly 5580 calories by walking home every evening. For me, the benefits did not end there. A typical one way trip home from school by bus costs me $0.81. Over a period of 30 days, I ended up saving $24. All it took was a little music and some podcasts that I follow quite regularly.

I did not attempt this challenge with the aim of saving money or losing weight (I play soccer regularly and my BMI is within the 'healthy' range). It was mainly aimed at cultivating some self discipline and see if I could keep up with it for 30 days. It was hard though, mainly on weekends when I had no particular reason to step out from home. 30 days later, I have eventually liked walking, particularly in the evenings, because it gives me time for myself, to reflect on the day's events and the pleasant weather is a bonus. All in all, I am happy with the way this challenge had progressed and hope to continue walking home in the days to come.

Fireside chat with Ms. Wang Yuyan

An edited version of this article was featured in the January 2011 issue of ENGINEERRUS (The official magazine of Temasek Engineering School) under the title of "No Mountain Too High". Below is the original transcript of the article that I had written before it was sent for editing and publishing.

Back in 2006, TP introduced its new Diploma in Integrated Facilities Management (IFM) course. Five years on, it has become one of the most sought-after courses in TP. We caught up with Ms. Wang Yuyan, one of the students from the pilot batch of 2006, and who graduated in 2009, to see how she was coping with life after TP.

Ms. Wang recently graduated from the prestigious International Hotel Management Institute (IMI) in Lucrene, Switzerland with a BA (Hons.) in International Hotel and Tourism Management. It is interesting to note that Ms. Wang’s acceptance into IMI throws light on how versatile and well recognized TP’s Diploma in IFM is. Taking time out to answer a questionnaire, she credits TP for preparing her for the future. “My Diploma in IFM provided me with the basic foundation for the hospitality industry. It has helped me to better understand what was being taught in class and as a diploma graduate it allowed me to advance to a higher level of study” she remembers. Some of her favourite subjects included Introduction to Hospitality and Tourism, Introduction to Language and Culture (French) and Attractions Management and Club and Resort Business. She fondly recalled memories of staying late in school with friends to meet project deadlines and how much the facilities provided by TP helped her to conduct her own self- study or for doing group work with friends.

Talking about life in Switzerland, she described how much she thoroughly enjoyed studying in Europe. “In our free time, my classmates and I would take the opportunity to travel around Europe. So far I have been to Milan, London and Amsterdam, places I would never think I'd visit. It has been quite an experience so far as it is my first time studying abroad and I am enjoying every single bit of it”.

Ms. Wang aspires to hold a managerial position at a five star hotel someday. We wish her all
the very best in this endeavor.

30 Day Challenge for January

Happy New Year everyone! My 30 Day challenge for January 'To take a picture everyday' was not much of a success. mainly for two reasons. Firstly, I was a little busy with an important school project which kept me occupied for most of the month and secondly I didn't really travel that much and my daily routine and travels were almost redundant. There was nothing really interesting to photograph. However, I did remember to take photographs during the few times that I traveled.

I will be travelling in March and I intend to redo this challenge, this time with better focus. As for the photos that I took this past month, here they are*.

I managed to take only 17 from my target of 30. Some of the pictures taken at night are grainy too. Apologies. I shall remember to carry, with me, a better camera next time.

Till next time...

*Update: When Blogger was updated to the newer version, my embedded slideshow broke as a result. So I had to add a link to the G+ album instead. 

30 Day Challenge for December

My 30 day challenge for December - 'No using Microsoft products' finally ended. Here's how I found alternates to get my work done.

OS - Ubuntu Linux 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat)
Browser - Google Chrome 8.0 for Linux
Office Suite - Google Docs (Online), Open Office 3.2(Offline)
Messenger - Empathy (Contains all contacts from Gmail, Windows Live and Facebook Chat)
Email - Gmail (My school email which is hosted by Hotmail is routed to Gmail, so I did not have to log in to hotmail to check my school email). Although I don't use any clients, I have Thunderbird installed as a backup.
Games - I don't play many games. I stick to the Zynga ones more these days.
Music - Rythmbox Media player and an iPod. I used SharePod to update the iPod instead of iTunes because there is no iTunes for Linux 'yet'.
School Work - Eagle for Linux from CadSoft for designing PCB boards and yes I stayed away from MPLab IDE for a month.

I could not avoid using Windows XP in the labs at school as the authorities did not permit me to install Linux on any of the school machines in spite of me insisting that its absolutely free. But to minimize damage I used XP to the minimal amount. I worked on hardware that did not require me to use the computer too much all through the month. There is no MPLab IDE for Linux yet, so I did not have  a choice in that matter, but I stayed away from code too. Occasionally I joined my colleague to help him get past bottlenecks in programming.

Here is the funny part. Only when I passed day 22, did I realize that I use a Windows Mobile cellphone. But then again, Windows Mobile 6.5 was such a disaster of an OS that I did not use it for anything except calling, messaging and alarms. I preferred using the wifi on the iPod touch while I was on the go. So technically, the cellphone would not have made much of a difference.

I am a big fan of Open Source products. Hence the funny challenge for the last month of the decade. Inspiration from Matt Cutts.

Funny Transitions - I taught myself to use Open Source Software

Years ago, with limited pocket money I found it hard to buy proprietary software. So I had to share computers with various family members in order to get my work done. Then came the switch to Open Source. I enjoyed a lot of the products that were available free of cost. Over time, I enjoyed using them so much that one day I eventually would give up my Windows OS and install Ubuntu. Now though, it seems like slower computers with bulky applications are not fun anymore. Now I find that I am gradually giving up Open Source software as well and switching to doing my work online. Numerous web apps make it a whole lot simpler to work.

Recently, I taught myself to use Picnik because while working on an important project Gimp gave way and crashed. When I restarted it, all my work was lost because I had forgotten to save it periodically. So is the case with office applications. I cannot afford the Office Suite from Microsoft. Even the student version seems to be quite costly when compared to the price of the alternate products - free. For many years, I used Open Office. These days, I am slowly shifting my work to Google Docs. Firstly, because they I love Google and their products and secondly because its free and easy to use. It also helps me to do away with my pen drive as the only thing I need to access my files now is my email address and password. It seems to be ironic that as the cloud gets stronger and stronger, local disks drives and computers are getting a lot weaker and prone to crashes thus making people trust them even lesser than they used to
It was a lot of fun using Picnik and it was a great learning experience for me as an amateur in photo editing. So is the case with Google Docs. I hope to eventually shift to the new Chrome OS once it is released sometime next year.

Programming on the PIC18F4520 microcontroller

Yes! I am finally doing this. The code below was used by me for programming on the PIC18f4520 microcontroller for our Embedded Controls and Applications (ECAPP) project. This took a while to come up here as a post because I could not locate the actual file that I had saved. As a matter of fact, I am still searching for it.

The code below is the second to the latest version that I had used for the project with my group. It has not been complete as per out project requirements and therefore may contain bugs and errors, particularly in the comments section. Some of the comments that denotes values used in the main() and the ADC portion may not match the actual values that the functions are designed to do. The names of variables and functions may look a little vague, this is because they are closely related to the topic given and were meant to simulate various conditions in the project. If you know what you are looking for, you will understand what you are looking at with minimal effort.

The code below consists of topics that cover areas such as interrupts, timers (all three), ADC, PWM, CCP/CCPCON, Serial ports and the related code to configure the COM ports. Note that the code used to configure the LCD is configured as a separate lcdheader.h file. All of the programming is written in C and compiled and run using MPLab from Microchip Technology Inc.

Note: All the code below is publicly made available with my group mates' consent. 



LCDHEADER.h

21

I turned 21 today. This post honoring the passage of time in my life would be regarded incomplete without...

...You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun

And you run and you run to catch up with the sun, but it's sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way, but you're older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death...

                                                    -- from 'Time' by Pink Floyd

Till next time... <3