Life @ NCP

_Boy: The girl I like..is you.
some stuff
Girl: Ok. I’m waiting for you to ask a question now.
Boy: So…who do you like?
Girl: No….
more guesses
Girl: My gosh this is so corny i can’t believe it’s happening.
Boy: whaaat….
more stupidity
Boy: oh oh..is it something along the lines of…will you go out with me?
Girl: Yes.
Boy: Oh._

What started as a total stranger, ended up to be a life-long friend. Quite amazing if I look in hindsight of what has happened because I have never thought that things would have turned out this way.

Thanks for being kind to me 🙂

We’re all a little weird. And life’s a little weird. And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up in mutual weirdness and call it love. ~ Anonymous

I have had some more practices of ironing because of the industrial training I had to do for this session. I seemed to be able to do it faster and faster each day (practice makes perfect yay!) so I want to share the techniques I found. This is focused on ironing buttoned-shirts, but I’m sure you will be able to use the advice on other type of garments.

Ironing takes a bloody long time, and what’s worse than spending >20 mins to iron one shirt just to find the back part of the shirt wrinkled because you tried to iron the sleeves? It is annoying. I now spend about <5 mins for a shirt, pretty happy about it but hoping to do it even faster if I can. It is not an enjoyable activity after all, but it just has to be done 🙁

I have two techniques: express and standard. The express one will take <3 mins and the standard will be <5 mins on average. Which one to take depends heavily on the type of material and the shape of the shirt.

Some materials with polyester are extremely easy to iron, even before you put the iron on it, it looks kinda smooth already. Higher percentages of polyester will make it even easier. 100% cottoned garment is a pain. It will usually take so much of your time trying to straighten it. After a long time ironing, it still sometime doesn’t look ironed. Sigh sigh sigh!

The shape of the shirt matters as well. Guys’ shirts tend to have straighter lines and less tucks. Girls’ on the other hand have darts/frills here and there which make them harder to iron.

Some rules of thumb to remember:

• Use iron with steam. Ironing without water is a nightmare. so steam irons are the best. Takes a lot less time than alternatively sprinkling water and ironing. The iron I’m using is Sunbeam with vertical steam technology.
• Get a proper ironing board, it does increase your ironing productivity as it makes you easier to pull and push the garments around. Board for traveling is ok I suppose, just make sure you have the pointier section on your left. This is very handy on ironing shoulder areas.

handy pointy section

• Always iron the smallest area first e.g. collar or sleeves. It is the easiest to be taken down first and being small, it is harder to get wrinkled by future movements. Even if it does, the wrinkles will be less likely to be seen when the shirts are worn.
• Use your left hand a lot (right hand if you are a lefty). You only need to make a locally level area to iron that particular area of the shirt, do not spend a lot of time to make the entire surface that you are ironing smooth first.
• Do not iron areas that already are smooth. Ironing does not mean that you have to cover every single cotton on the shirt, if it looks smooth already, then stop and go to the next pile of your laundry.
• Chuck away your perfectionist obsession. No matter how good you managed to iron the shirt, when it is worn, the smaller wrinkles will always show so don’t waste time on trying to remove those. Plus how often do you see girls with messy skirt (because they sat on them) or guys with wrinkled back on their shirts? I am sure that often happened, but have you ever put much attention to them? I highly doubt it.

Express way

You can do this if you are in a hurry or you know you can do it. It is not as tidy as if you do it the usual way so again don’t be too perfectionist otherwise you’ll spend longer using this way than the standard way. Basically express way saves you time because you will end up ironing less area of the shirt by ironing two layers at the same time.

1. Button up about 3-4 buttons on the shirt, enough for you to lay the shirt in a straight-ish way on the board.
2. Straighten the left sleeve with your hands. Iron it and then do the back of that sleeve.
3. Move to the right sleeve and do exactly the same.
4. Iron the body facing up (collar facing you) from the top to the bottom. See this pic:

5. Similarly, do it for the left side of the body.

6. Once you have finished that, slide the shirt (still buttoned) such way that you can iron just the back layer of the shirt. See pic:

7. That should remove the wrinkles at the back because the button at the front would have hindered you from ironing the back properly.

Standard way

If you don’t like the result of the express way, then do the standard way. This is more robust. It works with higher ironing-difficulty shirt =p These are the steps:

1. Iron the collar first as it is the smallest area of your shirt.
2. Straightened the left sleeve with your hands. Iron it and then do the back of that sleeve.
3. Move to the right sleeve and do exactly the same.

4. Now we are going to do the right shoulder. Arrange it to be like in the pic:

5. Smoothen the area as much as you can. Then move the shirt to iron the back part of the shoulder such shown in this pic:

6. Again, try to iron the area as much as you can, but the minimal target is to reach the middle line of the back of the shirt.

7. Do the same for the left shoulder.

8. By this step you will find that the shoulders are all smooth. Let’s go to the main body part of the shirt.

9. This is usually the easiest part to do. So start from the left-front body as shown in this pic:

10. Follow your own hands until you do a full circle of ironing from the left-front body, to the back, and then to the right-front body. You will find that the whole left-right directions that I provide here provide a movement continuity. You don’t have to follow them but as you do this way more, you will find that these directions minimalise the efforts needed.

Ok, you’ve reached the end of this very very long entry, hopefully you can find it useful. Please let me know if you try it yourself! 😀

It’s been a while since my last entry. I will blame everything on assignments. There was one due today, and there are more coming 🙁

On another note, I’ve been listening to Natasha Bedingfield’s new album: NB. Check out Pirate Bones, Soulmate and Say It Again if you have time. The melodies are nice and the lyrics not too bad, even thought I would like to have more depth on the latter two songs. In this album, she was a young woman who were focused on her love life in the midst of busy life style. Expect a lot of strengths and determination in the songs. Pirate Bones is excellent 😀
Click here to go to Natasha’s myspace. Sadly Pirate Bones is not there, but Say It Again and Soulmate are.

I thought because it has been a while, I will also do several updates from entries in the past:

my work @ the Bank: my manager finally get the idea and started to open some doors for me. My work is now getting enjoyable. It feels so much better when I look at my pile of work (that has now exists) to chose which one that I can do at the time, instead of thinking ‘ah, only have one work to do, and I have a full day work tomorrow. Should spare it for the future…’. I have proven that whinging is not a waste of time, as long as you whinge to the right person. In hindsight, if I have whinge more to my manager instead of other people, I might have gotten to where I am now much faster.

skin picking: even after frequent critiques from both Stef and Minie, I am still not able to stop it. Help >.< I now managed to hold until my fingers recover a bit more, but the biggest challenge is to not pick on the recovering skin because it’s thicker, and juicier…, and yummier =S

wisdom teeth: it is so naive of me to think that I could have the operation at week 10 uni calendar, which was about 3 weeks ago. I couldn’t even get any appointment with the dental surgeon until Nov 7th! That’s about a month waiting in the line.

More updates to come 🙂

You’re the most perfect yet, most definitely that I’ve met … ~ Natasha Bedingfield in Say It Again.

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

While I was doing my RT2 assignments, I found an interesting education paper about holistic view of learning ((Willis D, 1993. Learning and Assessment: Exposing the Inconsistencies of Theory and Practice)). In this paper, 6 concepts of learning were explained:

1. Learning to increase one’s knowledge.
2. Learning as memorising and reproducing.
3. Learning as applying.
4. Learning as understanding.
5. Learning as an interpretive process aimed at understanding reality.
6. Learning as changing a person.

A relationship exists between a learner’s concept of learning and the learning approach they are likely to use. Students who perceive learning as #1 or #2 will tend to adopt a surface approach (where the motive of learning is to meet the requirements minimally, usually for a short-term target) and students who perceive learning as #3, #4, #5 will tend to do deep approach (where the motive of learning is intrinsic interest to discover meaning and acquiring competence).

Looking back through my education history – spending about 14 years in Indonesian education system and about 4 years Australian until now – most of the learning approach I have used is surface approach.

Indonesian education system was terrible. I actually did not remember learning something if not for the sake of tests and exams. Maybe it is the fact that I was in K-12 level (maybe university level in Indo is a lot better?), I don’t know. All I know was that if I wanted to be somewhat recognised as the top-students, I would have to be an all rounder, getting high marks in ridiculously 13 subjects ((Religion, Civics, Mathematics, Indonesian, English, Sociology, Economy, Geography, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Computer, Physical Education)). I remember my gleaming pride after a full two nighters memorising two Biology books for the final exam, in total the books were almost 3 cm and I could reproduce every single diagram in them. Can I draw one of the diagram now? No way.

Even on the assignment that I am doing in this current session, I cannot stress how reliant I am to a marking guideline. I need to make sure that what I am producing is inline to what the marker wants to see. The marks have spoken themselves to say how successful I am in doing so, but I wonder what is it that I am learning. Being in uni for about 3 years, doing approximately 8 subjects a year, I can count with my fingers how many subjects support deep learning approach. These subjects are excellent and useful, the knowledge I gain is for my life, but unfortunately they are so hard to find. There are not many of great lecturers to conduct subjects like those ((To name almost everyone at the time I was at university: Richard Buckland from Computer Science and Engineering, Bruce Gordon from Business Law and Dubravka Cecez-Kecmanovic from Information System.)).

To be called an effective teacher, one will have to be able to measure the knowledge gained by the students objectively. This is by default inconsistent with concept #6: learning as changing a person. It takes too much time and it is extremely complicated to measure changes in students’ life individually and then compare each of them to each other. Those changes may not be able to be measured then, and one can’t even put any time frame of when it can be measured because each student is different. Great teachers with students’ achieving low marks in knowledge reproducing activities may be seen as incompetent teachers where as in fact they have changed the students’ view in life through their teaching. Sad eh?

I will be interested to hear what you think about your own concepts of learning and also your view of the education systems you have gone through. Have you learned useful knowledge for your life through the system or was it all just about exams?

I have tried to write positive things on this blog, but let me make an exception for this one. I have been called a perpetual whinger for a while now, and that is always associated to one thing. My work at the Bank.

Doing an internship in an office for 6 months is a risky business because there are only so much thing you can do to secure your job satisfaction for the period you are there. To start off with, you seek guide from other students that have spent their time in that company. If their experiences have been great, then you will be more incline to that company. But don’t be too sure yet, especially if it is a big company, because the experience of someone in one lively group maybe quite different to experience of someone in a morbid one.

I think there are four things to look for:

• Location. This is the easiest to pin down with little common sense. If it will take you 2 hours to get to the office then forget about it, travelling takes not just your time but also your energy. It’s true that you can read books on train/bus but if just being in any vehicle makes you dizzy and sick (like me), maybe it’s not such a great idea. Rule of thumb, get office that’s not too far from your house because your life is not just about work (and uni!), you need to make it practical for yourself to enjoy life parallel to your internship.

• Perks. I like W3Schools‘ motto: The best things in life are free. Perks can range from free cokes to free interstate travel (or overseas I think, even though I’ve never known anyone in BIT who was that lucky). They are nice to have, but not essential to make you happy at work.

• Work. This is the factor that will grab the most of your time being there. What kind of work you will be doing there? Each role gives you different type of work: some very technical roles require you to code as a developer, or as an IT architect; some very business role requires you to create documents such as requirements documents, process documents etc. The range is wide and it really depends on what you want to get out of you internship.

  • Do you want to experience what you have studied at uni?
  • Do you want to learn something completely new?
  • Do you want to be comfortable at what you can do already and pursue more in-depth experience?
    

  These are hard questions, do think about it before you contact anyone in the company. Being flexible about the type of work is great and highly necessary, but you will only be in internship for a short period of time, might as well use the most of it. If you do not know what you like, at least tell them what you do not like.

• People. This is the most important factor in making your stay in the company enjoyable and delightful. Once you step into a company, you are their employee and they have control over you (at least your mon-fri, 9am-5pm). Most of my daily whinges (coming soon) are about one person I work with. Yes, just one person. Many people I know are very accomodating so they are fine with an intern picking what kind of work the intern wants. But it is usually a combination of factors that makes the situation a lot more complicated (read: office-politics) and makes it hard to get around the bureaucracy. Knowing good people makes the politics bearable and can turn into your advantage. When you ask other people about the company, ask about WHO is good in there, the type of work come seconds. Once you are stuck with a bad lot, it is hard to get out without any violence.
  

Now, my whinging (if you still bothered to read this far, sorry for this looong entry). I got the Bank as my first preference. I got in to the group I wanted to, but not the right team within the group. The sort of work I got is alright (bits and pieces of process documentation and some access db) but I feel it is not enough to make me excited. Plus there are not much deadlines to pump my adrenaline. Everyday it’s a drag to go to work, so at first I tried to do my uni work at work. That didn’t work out long because my guilt accumulated.

I have spoken to my manager many times about not having enough work but he did not seem to care. It has been 2 months now and things hasn’t changed much since first week. The peak of my annoyance was just recently. I talked to him (after so much of anxiety) and tried to explain to him in the most diplomatic way I possibly can and managed to make him promise to do something about it the next day – which was yesterday. But nothing happened.

sad and pouting