Anyway, I would like to wish you all a happy, prosperous and successful year ahead. As usual, I will do a brief reflection of my life in 2008. Here are some highlights of Josiah's adventures in 2008:
1. The year started out very great, with a broken laptop :(
2. Multimedia University has a new president, and what an impressive president he is! He is radical and his policies mostly sound and rational. Rarely can I find someone who can carry his points across in such a convincing manner, convincing enough that everybody just has to agree with him because they just can't refute his points! He often preaches about "understanding the principles" rather than just "blindly following the rules like a religion". My favourite quote from him? "Work should be fun. If you haven't been having fun for the past ten years, then you have not been working!" I'm awestruck. You have my respect, Prof. Zaharin!
3. Being a lecturer for a first time: coordinating the course with Melaka campus, setting assignments, test and exam questions, marking them, reading the textbook,
4. Shook hands with Dr. Mahathir!
5. Stuffed myself with food for 2 whole days at a retreat at Pork Dickson. My weight increased by 2 kg since then and have never gone down ever since :(
6. Resigned from Multimedia University
7. Flying off back to Leeds again for my Ph.D.
8. Built my first ever snowman (I mean snowboy) :P
All in all, a very uneventful year apart from the little perks here and there. Hence the lack of posts as well.
And of course, at this point I would review new year resolutions. Last year, I've only put down one single resolution: "Get started on my PhD". Got started I did -- as my flatmate commented -- like a rocket. I've collected lots of pictures of pretty butterflies, manually annotated butterflies till my fingers grew numb, constructed a baseline system, tweaked the baseline system, ran thousands of experiments, done lots and lots of thinking to improve the system, and read goodness-knows-how-many papers. All these within 3 months (>.<).
Resolutions for this year:
1. Do well in my Ph.D. studies (I would prefer "finish my PhD" but that's rather far-fetched)
2. Gain a British accent (starting to get the hang of it, I find that it works if I DON'T try too hard)
3. Improve my cooking (I'm starting to get the hang of it!)
4. Start experimenting with baking
5. Do more touring!
6. Revamp this website!! The "Sweet Dreams with The Stars" theme was supposed to be temporary when this site first appeared in 2006, but it has been there ever since! I need a major revamp (as mentioned in a previous article), not just a change in layout/theme, but a major overhaul! But knowing my hectic schedule, I doubt that this will be done within this year :(
And that's it! Best wishes to you for the next 365 days and hope everything goes smoothly in 2009!