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学而不思则罔,思而不学则殆

Confucius says, "learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous". I don't quite agree with the translation, but I do find this sentence true. I personally interpret 罔 as "confused"and I find myself in a state of "confusion" now as a result of not thinking while learning.

When designing the architecture of a software, I didn't find a good clue until creating some viewcontrollers in the project and see how some open sourced projects approach similar questions. The thoughts usually turn out to be incomplete and full of flaws. That's different from very good software engineers. When two of my friends(very good software engineers) design the same software, they think very hard by themselves and draw the architecture on paper without touching the computer at all. Another example is job seeking. some of my friends(very good engineers/scientists) are very targeted. They seem to be more clear about what they like/dislike. In that case, they normally get offers from their desired companies wherever they decide to go. However, my mind is currently stucked with too many things and I'm not so focused. People succeed for some reasons. Though my way of doing things may not be wrong, it is always good to keep an open mind and probably learn some patterns from other successful people.

Important things to take notes.
1. I attended the Harbin Institute of Technology(HIT) Singapore Alumni Gathering on Tuesday. The president of HIT came to PGP for a short talk. Though I don't have a strong identity of that school, I do feel proud of its continuous progress. The president is humble and practical. His speech was full of intelligence. It's not the hardware that builds a school, but the Alumni.Many alumni already become Singapore PR/Citizens. Quite a large percentage are civil engineers, implementing projects like Gardens By the Bay and some strange-looking skyscrapers. Some are doing research in schools. It is also great to know that HIT is building up a world-class national space center to be the world's frontier in space engineering research.

2. I had the Mid-Term test on Graphics Rendering Technics. Thanks to Xiangyun who generously helped me understand some of the concepts, the test didn't go too bad. Honestly, I'm not quite interested in that course. I took this course purely because of the degree requirement. That's the only technical elective course I can pick that doesn't conflict with more important courses. Two of my preferred technical electives both conflict with CS3217, one of which is sound and music computing. As long as it won't downgrade my degree, that's fair enough.

3. I attended the Ruby workshop brought by NEO Singapore in the Saturday. It was a nice experience. I formed pairs with three different people to code Ruby together. I worked with a year one CS student(Minqi) on the last Ruby Challenge and we became the top three pairs who finished up the challenge.




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