Oh man, this has been the question that has been bugging me for the past 3 days.

Ever since fiddling with Eng Teck's D70 before he left for Korea, I have been yearning to get one for myself. The sensation of clicking the DSLR was pure orgasmic. Shutter speed was like zero seconds! Oh my goodness, where's the shutter lag?!!

But the IT fair at Suntec this week for Nikon was so disappointing. The Nikon cameras and lenses were actually more expensive than Courts and Harvey Norman. They justify the slightly higher prices by bundling useless stuff like 8R prints, multi card readers and umbrellas. I can't believe this marketing gimmick works so well for Nikon because there were hordes of people waiting to purchase the cameras.

Maybe I should sell my Panasonic camera on eBay and bundle it with a free AIA umbrella and a story book or something to boost bids.

Anyway, back to the D80, after looking through all the forums and articles, I'm thinking of getting it from external vendors like Alan Photo. They sell the D80 body at $1420. Plus the lens that I want (Nikkor 18-200mm VR) is selling for $1388, which brings to a grand total of $2808. Which really made me think twice (actually, more like 50 and counting) times about getting it.

It is really damn expensive leh. At a time when some of my friends are investing in penny stocks, mutual funds and warrants, swiping $3K out of my bank is actually quite embarrassing and heartbreaking.

And most importantly, I don't know if I can justify the costs. I love photography but I'm not the kind that take photos of sunflowers, or an empty beer bottle on the floor, or arrange 5 stones one after another to contrast the lightings... If anything, it's probably for travelling and landscape shots. (And if you do the math, I kinda need to take 6000 nice shots to make it 50-cents per picture.)

Hmm.. hmmm. hmmm... And it doesn't help that Lilin bought a pretty good camera (Lumix FX30) at $540. The shots below are the first few that we took with her camera. I think the quality is really good (of course, I recommended it!) and it is very portable... Maybe i should just screw everything and get a slim and sexy camera... Arghhh, haha, I'm so fickle-minded!

But I thought the wide-angled feature heavily marketed on consumer cameras are pretty over-hyped. I can't really see the difference leh.



And I just realize that the photo that I posted last month was salah. It should have been this one
instead.

Probably the best team dynamics that I have experienced in my 3 years in SMU. Fun. Laughter. Efficiency. Synergy. And it helps that each of us has an unique expertise that made the end product really spectacular.

From left: (haha, I'm going to wash dirty linen in public because they ostracize me!)

Eng Teck (Powerpoint Choreographer)
I never knew powerpoints can be an art form & can be choreographed but this guy is damn pro at what he does. When he said he was going to be the "powerpoint clicker", I honestly thought that he wanted to "eat snake" & take the easy way out of our presentation & I wanted to vie for for that job.

But he really puts in effort into the presentation details. He knows when and what each speaker will say or do & right on cue, the powerpoint will start displaying bubble headings, really professional animations & stuff, sort of like a fireworks display. During my free time, I tried to decipher his ppt & learn those bubbles animations but it's damn complicated. Tamade.

AND this guy is damn anal about the paper that he uses to print the report. He's the first person that I know that differentiates paper into different weights, textures & quite possibly scents as well. I'm very curious to see what his room looks like because I vision it to be filled with innumerable shelves of papers categorized into different grades, color, texture, size, gradient, scent, thickness and countries of origin. Whenever he wants to print an assignment, I can imagine him walking to his shelves, pondering for a good few minutes, caressing different papers before finally making his decision.

Tell me it is not normal right? Aha. Because Kenny categorizes his paper into only 2 kinds: Plain(2 blank sides) and rough(1 blank side).

Jaclyn (SPSS Goddess)
She is THE ONE that we go to when we want to analyze & decipher our survey results & find causations with SPSS program. Every meeting, we will tell her what we want to find out and thereafter we will worship her. By the next morning, she will then bless us mere mortals with the analysis via our emails.

I'm not sure if anyone validated her work because I didn't. Each time I open her files, I will get a splitting headache from seeing the figures, tables, charts and confidence intervals. To rid myself of these migraines, I will typically close the file immediately and email her "GOOD JOB JAC!!" & dump her file into a "never-to-be-opened-again" folder which I had specially created for her. (& is now in the recycle bin)

Caroline (Report Compiler & Editor)
My roomie from UBC!!! Haha. The one that I ponned class with in Vancouver to travel 18 hours by bus to Rocky Mountains!

Very proficient at compiling data & she got the coverted ExxonMobil internship! Rich intern who pang-seh me for my modules next term. =(

Ker Choon (FGI Analyst & Editor)
My 'supervisor' from Convocation 2006, the one that I went to to beg for complimentary parking tickets at Suntec City. Never did expect we will be in the same project group just 2 weeks later.

***
Essentailly, our diagnosis of Tiger Beer's problem was that it lacked variety & the current Tiger Classic is too "ah-pek" ish & common to attract the tertiary student crowd & executives. And Tiger lacks variety to appeal to people with different taste.

We likened our proposed strategy to that of Toyota. Corolla is a common, cheap & good car. A car that appeals to commoners but not to that of its other target segments. To appeal to the niche crowds without reducing the appeal to the core consumers, Toyota introduced the hip & trendy Yaris & the more executive Camry.

Likewise, we suggested a Tiger Light to appeal to the younger crowd & Tiger Gold to appeal to the executives.

The idea for the Tiger Lite advert is for it to be in a comic-book Batman style to herald its arrival in the market & image-wise, it's funky enough for youngsters to be seen with it.

Tiger Gold, on the other hand, is well, a cut above the rest of the beers, & the advert tries to be special & extraordinary.

***

URA carparks are not attractions on their own, & nobody goes to Orchard just to park at the carparks... So for the print ads, we suggested creating associations with key activities around the carparks. Such that when they think of going to Borders, subconsciously URA Wheelock will be a top-of-mind choice in the driver's consideration set.

Thursday night was crazy. In a quest to do up a good report for CB (Consumer Behavior) project, I sat at my desk and worked from 9pm till 5am, wanted to save my word document but it HANGED!!! I started cursing & shaking my head in disbelief, started talking to the laptop, asking it why it was doing this to me on my day of freedom, I shook it hard, hoping it would revive.

As usual, it kept silent and still.

I pulled the plug on him at 5.15am. Started red0ing my work, saving the file every 120 seconds, saving it into my external hardisk every 30minutes. I slept from 7.30am to 10am, continued working on it from 10am till 4.15pm, drove to school, binded the 46page mother-troublesome report, dumped it into prof's pigeonhole at 4.45pm, and went home to sleep for 15 hours straight.

Pure unadulterated bliss.

And the December holidays finally beckons for me. Which isn't much to begin with since I will be starting my marketing internship at Lexus on the first week of December, meaning that I won't be able to go to Hong Kong and Shanghai with my mum. But hopefully, the internship will be a good experience for me; make some friends, suck up to the boss & ultimately get staff discount for cars. haha.

Anyway, I think this has been a pretty good semester for me. Managed my work better, grew stronger relationship-wise, and I was really blessed with good project mates for all my modules this semester.

These have been some of the stuff that have kept me busy for the past 10 weeks.

***
CAT Project: Pawnstar



Not quite the "jumbo-jet" that we set out to do, but at least got "yacht" lah. We developed an Excel program that pegs "live" gold & currency prices, manages pawn accounts securely and set optimum interest rates.

A project that we slogged it out till 6am in the morning, doing up macros, reports & powerpoint... We probably over-did the project, but in a really good way. Our project captured most of the class' attention, got people interested and ask questions, all of which we had an answer to.

To see us repelling all the arrows shot at us brought lots of satisfaction to my heart.

All the nitty gritties... They were worth it.

***
FIM (Financial Institutional Markets..Correct?)

Again, had really good project mates for this one. Made up of all accoutants except me. haha. Very disciplined bunch, we finished our project with 2 weeks to spare, which freed me up to do the marketing projects. And it was interesting how I wanted a formal serious presentation and the accoutants wanted a video and a more "rah-rah" presentation format



I ended making quite a sad video but it evinces my mood at that time; confused about continuing with Finance as a second major or to drop it. I like marketing too much & finance seems like a burden to me. It doesn't help that Finance modules have all the dean-listers and the poly grads that speak Finance as their mother tongue

In comparison, I speak Finance like sputtering Japaneses learnt from playing Winning Eleven.

And I can't see myself working in the Finance industry in future. Those jobs are just not for me. I don't want to wake up every morning doing the same old routine; brushing the same old set of teeth, going to work in the same old car, doing the same old work, different numbers but the same old formulas...

I want a job that challenges my creativity, not my efficiency.

So during the course bidding, I told God that I will leave it to Him. I bidded much higher for my Arts & Science mods and much lower than my friends for the Finance mods. And lo and behold, I got outbidded for my Arts mods and I got all my Finance mods. So I guess God has spoken. =)

And oh, I made an interesting observation at TCC when we celebrated the end of our presentation with expensive food. I footed the bill first & ALL the accoutants paid me back in EXACT change. Not $10 or $10.30, but like $10.32...

I believe they are trained to do that and I think they can compound interest rates without financial calculators but I'm just saying it's a far cry from what my other business friends will do.

My business friends will either round the sum to pay me or more often than not, they will talk their way out of paying.

It's the time of the semester again when I get completely swamped with projects. I started the semester with only 4 icons on my desktop. Now, half of my lappie screen is tatooed with powerpoints, folders, excel sheets, pdf files, post-its... I forsee my laptop crashing on me in the forseeable future.

Either that or Mr. Lappie will have a relapse of "Alzeimers' Disease" and all my important files will mysteriously go missing again.

On the bright side, I'm enjoying my projects (so far). My project for Consumer Behavior is on the parking behaviors of motorists at coupon-based carparks. It's based on my "profound" theory that any system based on integrity will be taken advantage of. So during my free time, I hide in the bushes opposite Cineleisure to observe people cheating on their coupon parking and prove my hypothesis true.

Marketing Research project is going to be pretty ambitious. For one, we found a real client (Tiger Brewery) and they want us to do an extra presentation for their marketing team. So what should have been a really simple & small-scale project that can be "smoked" will have to spiral into a full-blown pile of free research work for Tiger Beer.

Hopefully, we will do well and they will repay us with a lifetime supply of free beer and a trip to Hollywood to meet Jessica Alba.

CAT (Excel) project worries me the most. It drives me crazy with all the formulas and weird combinations of characters that when keyed in together, will create magnificent charts, simulations and financial statements. But to be fair, I have to say CAT amazes me the most. It does to numbers what Photoshop can do to pictures. Simply awesome.

And past students have come up with the most outrageous projects with Excel. Poker simulation games, a digital piano that can teach you how to play the piano, Wedding Planner guide blah blah... All these on a simple Excel sheet. When our professor showed us those projects, we were looking at them in awe as if we were watching David Blaine levitating in front of us. ("Oh my God","How did you do that????")

CAT is a classic example of how SMU students like to "spoil market" for one another. If you teach a SMU student how to make a motorbike, he's going to build you a car for his project. The next batch of students will build you a boat. And by the time it's my turn to do the project, I will probably build you a jumbo jet.