Open MOB

I was happily doing my Industrial Automation tutorials (oh what a blatant lie!), when I suddenly received this message:

All NSMen with the call sign "Virtual Spine" please report to seminar room E4-04-02 immediately.

What the?!?! I'm under IHL (Institute of Higher Learning) for goodness sake!! They can't just recall me as and when they like!!

Best of all, only Erin and I (didn't have to initially but Prof Teoh was a little displeased at the turnout) turned up for the MOB briefing today. The others are going to squat in the Detention Barracks (aka DB, some sort of military prison for offenders) for 3 months because of Absence Without Official Leave (AWOL). Here's the list of offenders:

• Kek Wei Kiat
• Keh Enli, Justin
• Kong Weizhao, Benjamin
• Lee Hon Choon
• Tey Shuwen

Being dragged along to attend some totally irrelevant talk just to make my supervisor happy, is probably the most stupid thing I've ever done in my 4 years in NUS. The talk was given by a guest speaker (a 1st class honours NUS grad and currently an entrepreneur), on High Performance Computing.

How wonderful. I hoped he couldn't tell from my expression that I have absolutely no idea what those three words stand for when put together. Anyway, Puay Siang (whose call sign isn't even "Virtual Spine") was lucky enough to be passing by the seminar room when Prof Teoh 'pushed the button' (army slang for activation of recall manning), bumped into Prof Teoh, who said to her, "Puay Siang, there's a very interesting talk on High Performance....."

Jeremy, who witnessed the above event together with me, and I looked at each other and shook our heads.

The speaker commenced, while Erin was still making her way down from Engine Auditorium (it's not anywhere near, trust me). While he went through his presentation slides, I noted down the proportion of terms that I have never heard of before. Should be at least 70%. So I sat down there like a fool, puzzling over the "Beowulf concept of building a supercomputer by networking a few personal computers together", some TCP/IP issues that affect data transfer and a whole lot of other nonsense for almost 2 hours (and mind you, the speaker was already zooming through his slides [thankfully]).

If Prof Teoh is planning to buy a cluster (i.e. buy a few pcs), that means all of us (FYP sutdents) will have enough pcs of a reasonable standard for our use. But Jeremy had to say "No" when he was asked for his opinion. Great move Jeremy.

After the talk and blogging for this post, I realised didn't accomplish anything after lunch today. I could have completed one tutorial before my Industrial Automation lecture. Got to go for lecture now.