Joshua on February 20th, 2009

Naches (n): The glow of pleasure-plus-pride that only a child can give to its parents.
Kvell (v): To beam-with-immense-pride-and-pleasure, most commonly over the achievement of a child or grandchild; to be so proudly happy your buttons can bust.
- Leo Rosten, 1968 (The Joys of Yiddish)-

I just finished marking my students’ first game projects – 20 or [...]

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Joshua on February 12th, 2009

Whew! I just spent most of this week dealing with complaints over marking. Over a measly 2 – 4 % points. I didn’t really believe it at first, but my senior colleagues were right after all. It’s a little scary how focused some NUS students are on anything that may hint that they’re not doing [...]

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Joshua on February 6th, 2009

I finally went and bought my new laptop from the NUS IT Co-Op store today!

This is the Acer 4935G, the latest model that just came in. It’s probably the most powerful and feature-rich laptops among all those available at the NUS store, and unlike its’ predecessor, the Acer 4935, the keyboard layout and design isn’t [...]

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Joshua on January 29th, 2009

I just spent 5 hours marking 60 students’ 200-word essays.
That works out to an average of 5 mins per student… which isn’t all that much, if you take each case on its’ own.  But the cumulative mental fatigue is exhausting. By the end of it all my mind was nearly numb. And yet, I couldn’t [...]

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Joshua on January 28th, 2009

Today I taught my first tutorial class for NM3216 Game Design. It went smoothly, and I’m quite happy. Admittedly, the tutorials for this class aren’t that strenous to conduct – they’re basically just a briefing and introduction at the beginning, and then wandering from group to group giving advice on their various game ideas, followed [...]

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