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.