I was musing to people about my latest plan: to buy up the terrace houses along Heng Mui Keng Terrace (near Business) and build a branch of Hotel 81 there, offer special student hourly rates, and watch the money roll in. Some might point to how hostel rooms are designed for precisely this purpose, but not everyone is a Hall Inmate, and even some who are are risk-averse, the scholars especially.

Someone told me that there already was a "Fragrance Hotel" (not the real name, but something he thought of on the spur of the moment) near school, so I decided to seek it out after my last paper.

After some walking, I found "Pasir Panjang Inn", with a daily room rate of $75. They also had day use rates from $40 to $55 in $5 increments ("no day use after 8pm"). The hotel's location is far enough from school to afford lovebirds some degree of privacy, yet near enough to walk to conveniently (the rent's probably not as high as along Heng Mui Keng Terrace, too). There's even parking for those lazy to walk there!

Come to think of it, sometimes when waiting at the bus stop near Heng Mui Keng Terrace, I saw couples walking down in that direction. I'd never known what they were doing, since there was nothing of interest there, but now I do!

Maybe I can still formulate a business model around pairing (or trio, or quartet, or quintet, if they prefer) people who have no one to go there with. This should be even more profitable than finding rooms for people to squat in!

[Addendum: "no man.. u know, they tell us USP blocks are to facilitate group work and stuff. rubbish man. its all abt the gvt's ploy to get scholar to marry scholar so we can get scholar babies. maybe that's why i NEVER see anyone checking our usp rooms. esp when i hear so many stories abt RAs checking other blocks often enough to have evicted (last time, before the revision of the rules to a fine) and fined quite a number of couples

honestly
wah rrao

stayed here for almost 3 years and i swear. other than the mandatory room check at the beginning of sem (always before 11pm) to make sure there are no squatters, we never have room checks. unless someone paotoh you. thats another story."]


I don't want to see the letters "IS" or "LM" ever again. Unfortunately I think I'm going to have to be reacquainted with them during the holidays in preparation for next semester.

It seems some PRCs staying on campus free-ride by throwing their clothes into washing machines while other people are using them. Then when they take them out later, the original person's clothes go missing.

The Arts Club has this project called "Dirty Laundry". People write down whatever they want to say about the Arts Club or the school, and it gets stuck up on T-shirts hanging from a clothes line. I was quite impressed with the project, especially since they put up my note about the Arts Club and NUSSU being like NTUC in their dealings with the administration. However, someone pointed out this amusing piece of "dirty laundry" to me: "Chicks - aint it cold in the LTs and Tutorials - Pls dress up!"

A day before the start of examinations, someone was printing 2.5 module-semesters' (1 module semester is a unit akin to Kilowatt-Hours and equivalent to the material needed for one module in one semester) of notes. I told him that hugging Buddha's leg wouldn't be enough - he'd need to perform a rather more indelicate service for him.

Around the time Reading Week starts, the Central Library becomes a really awful place to study. For one, there's oxygen deprivation: having a large number of people staying in a confined, poorly ventilated and relatively confied (at least compared to Law and Business) space for extended periods of time is a recipe for disaster. Also, there's the smell. Well, the smell I'm told about, rather. Male olfactory senses are not as finely honed as female ones, so I will take my friend's word for it. She says it's because some people don't bathe. Perhaps I unconsciously smell the smell, so although it doesn't register consciously, it leads to my feeling that the atmosphere there is positively oppressive, and I feel jittery and prone to suffering from bouts of hysterics. Another thing that makes it irritating is that most of the time, at least a third of the seats have bags and belongings at them, but no people.

Laser printing is 4 cents per page at Law, Business and Science (though the latter has a horrible system where you need to buy a prepaid card and student assistants release the print job for you), but 5 cents a page at Arts, USP and I hear in Engineering and Medicine also. Price discrimination is at work, since in all places printing is run by Seng City Trading. Someone speculated that there wasn't price discrimination since the paper at Business was worse, but I and my panel of 2 experts thought the paper at Business was of better quality than at Arts. Meanwhile photocopying in the libraries costs 3 cents a page, but 2.5 cents a page outside. A more complicated analysis of comparative elasticities might warrant an ISM (someone is doing one on CORS this semester - "Module Allocation - An Efficiency Analysis", damn).

I saw a PRC in the library reading a book: "Concepts of Criticism". The chapter he was on was: "The Concept of Romanticism". Wah.

I realise one reason I dislike essay exams is that I can't do the essays justice in 2 hours.

I heard some people wheel in trolleys full of books for open book exams.

It seems the bell curve applies in a module whenever there are more than 30 people in it.

A friend of mine booked a taxi to come after her exam, so she could reach home speedily. Wah.