The Third Terminal

Wow. That title sounds so like SPM huh?

Uh well, what­ever, as long as it does fit the con­text. Swin­burne is my third terminal.

Classes started today! XD Drove myself to Swin­burne at 7.30am, heed­ing james’s advice to go early for park­ings. But even when you’re guar­enteed empty park­ing lots that early, traf­fic jams are still inevitable.

Bum­mer.

I reached cam­pus at 8am, know­ing fairly well that there will be no tuto­ri­als for the first week, which means my 10.30am class is off. But I went early any­way, to set­tle some stuff with the admins and pro­lly get used to the cam­pus a bit. And also the meet the arang gang with their rou­tine gath­er­ing at the cafe­te­ria. =P

Siat Wei and Ah soon reached only at nine. Lec­tures didn’t start until 1.30pm, when we barged into room 8.13 and sat down like eager pri­mary stu­dents attend­ing their first class. XD

intro to the foun­da­tion in engi­neer­ing course, ori­en­ta­tion day.

Ms. Adrina Lai, our lec­turer for Physics A, briefed us on the course out­line for the subject.

Ms. Sashirekha then took over for another brief­ing on the course out­line on Engi­neer­ing Math. She had a great sense of humor which made her lec­tures pretty fun. Which at the same time she man­aged to mildly freak us out of our easy-going mind­set. Note to self: bah-forget it. I need more Sashirekha lec­tures. XD

Then it was Ms. Cordelia with two hours of Oral Comm. and Pre­sen­ta­tion. Notice that i’ve been using the title Ms to address all my lec­tur­ers above? XD Blame that on Ms. Cordelia, who spent a good 15 min­utes alone explain­ing the dif­fer­ence between Mr, Mrs, MISS and Ms. which have some­thing to do with fem­i­nine rights and the likes, heh. Quite an eye-opener though.

I bet you didn’t know that the title Ms came about as a result of the effort of fem­i­nine activists (or at least I think that’s what they’re called XD) to have a title for women on par with mens’ Mr., where mar­riage is of no con­cern. Appar­ently, they think that women have as much right as men to not declare their mar­riage sta­tus. Just in case you haven’t notice, the Mr title for men applies to both mar­ried and unmar­ried males whereas women have to choose from either Mrs. (mar­ried) and MISS (sin­gle). The Ms title is as you guessed — neutral.

Well, she was pretty fun too. Her com­mand of eng­lish is impec­ca­ble. Fit­ting, as we expected no less from a lec­turer of that sub­ject. Some­thing tells me I’ll be look­ing for­ward to Oral classes. XD Just hope I’ll be able to say that when the assess­ments starts. =\

BTW, we were required by the engi­neer­ing sub­jects to get our­selves an RM620 cal­cu­la­tor. Yeah, that is pro­nounced as six hun­dred and twenty ring­git. Piaw has a whole para­graph ded­i­cated to its price. Seri­ously though, it doesn’t take a rocket sci­en­tist once again to tell you that it’s freak­ing overpriced.

Just so you get the pic­ture if you haven’t yet. It costs almost the same as a Motorola Razr, five times the price of a high end D-link router (RM120), and 200 bucks short of an orig­i­nal iPod nano.

C’mon, six hun­dred bucks for a freak­ing cal­cu­la­tor?