Getting back into shape

Since I ended my collegiate swimming career in March, I've been slacking off in the fitness department. Over the summer, I lifted or swam like once or twice a week in Singapore. Their pool was gorgeous but nauseatingly hot, since it was outdoors and they did not have any sort of aerator system to cool it off. Plus it was long course (50 meters), and I hate long course with a passion.

 

 While I was in China, I swam a few times but never ventured into the weight room... mostly because I didn't want to get judged and stared at by creepy asian guys while they worked out. Note~ if you have never been to China, girls do not work out or play sports. In fact, they don't even like to ride bikes and prefer sitting on the back bumper thing and letting a guy ride the bike. So it was already interesting to them that my friend Christine and I were working out. Apparently biking to class and everywhere around town is enough of a workout for the local girls.

In order to use the lap swim lanes at Tsinghua University's pool, we had to pass the deep water swim test. The deep water swim test was swimming a 200. Communicating the information on my deep water swim test ID card was interesting, because I do not read Chinese and the lifeguard there did not speak English. I had a little difficulty figuring out what the little card meant by "faculty", since I wasn't familiar with that Chinese word. Luckily, a student who spoke some English came into the lifeguard office and translated "faculty" as what major we were studying at the University. Here is a picture of my ID card that says I passed the deep water swim test - the first line written in blue ink is my name in Chinese, and the second line in blue ink says Industrial and Systems Engineering, which was the whole "faculty" debacle.

So since coming home to California, I've been trying to get back into shape and work out more than I did over the summer. I've been to Crossfit Pleasanton a few Saturdays in a row for their "free drop-in session," and its not too bad. Actually, I've lost so much strength since I stopped lifting that I've been getting my butt kicked by 35-year-old moms that work out there... last Saturday's workout included 50 reps of a Thruster, which is a signature Crossfit lift that is essentially a dead lift to overhead push press. I was barely able to handle the 45 lb bar, and had to pause and take a break after every 10 reps and the mom working out next to me just cranked out almost all 50 in a row. And its been a while since I've done pullups, so I was struggling to learn how to do the "kipping" pullup and the mom next to me cranked out 30 pullups in a few minutes.  Overall, the Crossfit Pleasanton gym was pretty nice and the group workout of the day was great since it pushed me to work harder than the moms. I would definitely be a regular if it wasn't so expensive to work out there.

Image courtesy of CrossfitPleasanton.com

Being a student athlete in college really spoiled me, because now I tend to only do Olympic-style lifts at the rack and with the free weights. I went to lift today at another gym in the area called Gainspeed, which specializes in training high school athletes. The owner was really nice and let me work out for free, which was a sweet deal.

This is how I knew I was really out of shape - I'm terribly ashamed to say this but I was able to hang clean more weight than I could squat. I need a few more weeks to get back into reasonable lifting weights, but by then I will be leaving for Ukraine! Oh, the life of a swammer. I'm looking forward to finding a swimming pool and weight room to lift in when I get to Ukraine.

Wafer Fab Plant Visit

We took our final exam today in our Supply Chain logistics class! Whew! It feels great to be done with that, and with our group project. My group was Doris, Annie, Michelle and myself and we presented about Apple's supply chain operations in the Asia Pacific region. Hopefully we did well, Annie and I designed our powerpoint with a lot of sweet smart art graphics and charts and Doris interned at Apple so she helped us with the inside scoop.

This afternoon, we went to visit a wafer fab (fabrication) plant at SSMC. That stands for Super Secret Micro Chips.



Just kidding, it stands for Systems on Silicon Manufacturing. We had a short presentation about the company from one of their HR guys, then we got to put on the onesie suits and go into the clean room to see how they actually manufacture the wafers! I wish I could have taken pictures inside, especially of us in the clean room suits, but there was no photography allowed for company IP security reasons.So here are some pictures pulled from Google images to show you what clean room bunny suits look like:



These suits are specifically designed to keep dust and other contaminating particles out of the clean room. We had to take off our shoes and put on the one piece suit, then zip up booties over our feet. We also had to wear hair nets over our hair (even though our hair was under the little hooded part of the suit), latex gloves and surgical masks over our faces, including our nose. After putting on the suit, we walked through a dry air shower to clean us and our bunny suits off one last time before we were allowed to walk into the clean room where all the fabrication machinery was.

This is what a silicon wafer looks like (up close). The SSMC plant in Singapore that we visited today produces around 50,000 of these 8-inch diameter wafers every month. Each wafer takes about a month and a half to produce. I am not quite sure how this plant measures up against other wafer fabrication plants in Taiwan and China, but our HR tour guide was unsure how to answer my question when I asked him that.



This plant in Singapore actually gets the raw silicon from suppliers and then manufactures these disc-shaped things called wafers. Then they process the wafers and add different layers called masks to them to create patterns and miniature circuits. Then they test the wafer during the finishing process and then use lasers to slice a disc into what eventually turns into little microchips that go inside a computer or a cell phone. It was really cool to see the giant machines that looked like supercomputers from the 1980s, run by a mix of people that were dressed in the clean room scrub suits and ancient computers with some sort of GUI software.



This visit reminded me a lot of when my dad took me to Motorola on Daughter-to-work day when I was younger, my dad works in semiconductor design stuff and showed me a clean room when I was like 10. Yes, I'm that nerdy :)

A is for Ambiguous PC Toolkit Update

I received an email just about an hour ago from the Peace Corps notifying me that they just updated my Toolkit online... but I am not sure what they have updated? I logged into their website immediately of course and my Toolkit still looks the same, they're still reviewing my medical documentation. So maybe that means that they finally received the medical tests that I did here in Singapore. Those tests better be sufficient and up to their medical standards because I won't be in Singapore much longer and I have no idea what kind of medical care that I will have access to in China. I can't wait to get medical clearance, because that will be just one step closer to getting placed in a program somewhere in Eastern Europe and then getting my official invite to join the Peace Corps!

RoboCup 2010

This weekend, I stayed in Singapore again and volunteered at Robocup 2010! RoboCup is an international robotics and AI competition, it is hosted in a different location each year. There are 4 main divisions to the competition - Soccer, Home, Rescue, and Junior. This year's competition was hosted by Singapore Polytechnic University, so most of the volunteers were college students about my age and the officials were professors from the university.



The RoboCup competition was held at the Suntec Convention Center in downtown Singapore, which took me about 45 minutes to get to by public transportation. I walked about 10 minutes to the closest public bus stop behind our dorms, then took a bus to the Harbor Front MRT train station. From Harbor Front, I took the north-east train to Doby Ghaut, where I switched to the circle train and took that to the Esplanade station downtown. Luckily the Suntec building was right next to that MRT station, so I didn't have to do much walking around by myself downtown.

According to their official website, the goal of the RoboCup Soccer is to develop a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots by 2050 that can win against the human world champion team in soccer. This is a medium-sized humanoid robot soccer team.



RoboCup at Home focuses on developing real-world applications and human-machine interaction with autonomous robots that can assist humans in everyday life. So these robots are designed differently (more bot-looking and less humanoid looking).



One major application of RoboCup technologies is search and rescue in large scale disaster situations. This is just part of the Rescue obstacle course that the robots will compete on.



We hosted Robocup at Georgia Tech in 2007, where I had fun volunteering as a referee in the Junior Soccer division. RoboCup occupied the entire 5th floor of the CRC, which is the only time in my 4+ years at Tech when I have seen the basketball courts completely used by an outside conference. Usually Tech and the CRC make a big deal out of reserving a few basketball courts specifically for student use, but I guess RoboCup just paid the extra fee to rent out the entire venue.

This year I was assigned to help with the setup for the Junior division tables and with Junior registration. RoboCup Junior is targeted at primary and secondary school students, providing consistent challenges from year to year and emphasizing the sharing of ideas in a friendly learning environment. With a few other volunteers, I labeled every single one of these tables for the 300 teams in the Junior division.



Here is what the Junior soccer tables look like. The playing field is smaller, so the kids in the competition can build smaller and less sophisticated robots than the ones in the humanoid competition (shown above).



Then we ate lunch together, we had something called Biryani which was essentially curried rice, chicken and vegetables. It was wayyyy spicier than the guys told me that it would be, but it was good.



And apparently I was supposed to just dig into it with my hands, but I just decided to stick with the fork and spoon. The other volunteers just laughed at me and dug in, this is the guy that they called the vacuum cleaner for how much he ate.



There was some kind of traditional Malaysian music performance during opening ceremonies, which was cool.



And tons of Europeans at the competition were sporting those awkward length pants that are really capris, also known as "man-pris". I also saw quite a few guys wearing terrible jorts (jean shorts) that were the awkward capris length, but unfortunately was only able to capture this guy in the man-pris.

The Prima Revolving Restaurant over Singapore's Harbor

Today, our professors took us to a revolving restaurant overlooking the shipyard and harbor of Singapore. The Port of Singapore is apparently the largest transhipment point in the world, connecting the east and the west by sea. It was really interesting to see real-life port operations, especially after simulating the ports along the coast of East Africa for my Senior Design project. Though I'm fairly certain that the Singapore port operates much more efficiently than Mombasa, Djibouti or Dar es Salaam :) And it definitely has more berths, just look at all those cranes down the side of the port!



The restaurant was only on the 9th floor, but it was definitely high enough to provide a great view of the Port and of some of downtown Singapore. Professor Chen Zhou warned us that it would look like a warehouse from the outside. In this picture, you can barely see the little round part on top of the building, thats where we were!



On the way in, some of our group posed with the cut-out of the famous chef in the lobby. One of the local NUS students remarked that Bill (in the yellow shirt) sort of resembled the chef.



Then, the guys tried to pack the elevator over its full capacity, or should I say FCL? Can you tell we're all Industrial Engineers?



It turned out to be a really fancy restaurant... they served all 30+ of us a 6 course meal with Peking duck! Here is the girls table(plus Chris and Adi): we're still at LTL because we were waiting on a lady from DHL to join us.



This is me, Doris and Michelle! Doris is our friend who actually attends NUS, she is from China and super sweet. She was our tour guide around campus the first day and just finished up her supply chain internship at Apple here in Singapore.



We started out the meal with shark fin soup. It was kind of strange, the shark fin was very stringy and the soup had a thick consistency like egg drop soup.



The place setting on the table was a bit interesting, your tea cup sits on the left instead of your right. So much for learning the "b and d" technique with your hands in Total Person.



After the soup, we had a dish with 2 tiliapias. Annie loved the fish heads.



Next was a shrimp dish (they were the biggest shrimp that Annie had ever seen).



Our next course was the Peking duck wraps. I think these are like the tacos of the Chinese culture, with duck skin, meat, and a green onion inside a rice flour wrap covered in real duck sauce. Duck sauce should not be that orangey sweet and sour sauce that people always ask for at Rusans.



We also had some vegetables with scallops and a noodle dish. I think the noodle dish had duck meat in it as well.



For dessert, we had fruit (of course)and some sort of fried pancake with red bean paste inside. We always have fruit after the meal at home, I suppose this is one aspect of the asian culture that I am already used to!



During the course of the meal, Joe came over to show off his newly acquired skills of pouring tea without touching the hot teapot.



Seeing the port from above was really cool, especially since you get a much better sense of how big their operations actually are. Just look at the size of these yellow cranes, and how the white offices on top of them look so small. Those offices probably have the standard 10 ft tall ceiling.



Each container vessel will dock at a berth and wait to be unloaded and reloaded by these cranes. The vessel will be loaded with cargo depending on its final destination or next transhipment point, so that it will carry a full container load. After being loaded with cargo, the vessel will u-turn (assisted by tugboats) and head back out of the port. There are not really any warehouses in the port, except these few warehouses that break-bulk the containers for more optimal loading. These are probably the most aesthetic warehouses that I've ever seen (the blue buildings with glass windows and roofs).



There are a ridiculous number of containers at the port. Talk about an absolutely ridiculous queue.



The contemporary white building on the right is the Vivo Mall, the crazy 4 floor shopping mall that we went to our 1st day in Singapore! It doesn't look that tall in this photo but I think there are some basement floors. And the island on the left is Sentosa Island, where we took our first field trip.

The East Coast of Singapore

This weekend, NUS was doing maintenance work on our dorms so they shut off the power, water and internet all day on Saturday. So most of the people from my study abroad group went to the beach in Indonesia this weekend, on a ferry. A few of us stayed in town and spent all day yesterday on the East Coast of Singapore. Singapore is an island and Changi, the major airport (SIN) is located on the East Coast. Singapore also has a large harbor since it acts as one of the main trading ports between the East and the West.



There is a beach that runs all the way around the east coast with imported sand and really dirty water. I don't understand why the water is so dirty here, its just filled with a lot of trash and random floating debris. I think Singapore should invest in some kind of environmental cleanup operations, where they just install more trash cans along the beach or something. The fine for littering in Singapore is something ridiculous like $5000 but obviously its not that harshly enforced along the little east coast beach.



I can't believe we swam in this water. Actually I can, because it was so hot and humid outside. But random pieces of trash like cigarette cartons, food wrappers, bottles, etc kept running into me and it was disgusting.



Holly and I had fun on the beach :) we both got really burned though, because we were out there for a few hours and definitely did not reapply sunscreen.



And we built a sweet sand castle guy, recycling some of the leaves and trash that was in the water.



We rented bikes from a place in the park, it cost $6 for 2 hours with the bike. There was a bike path going along the coast for like 10km or something like that. We spent all 2 hours on the bikes and probably rode like 5 miles or so.



I got a sweet bike bell on mine :)



They have a dedicated bike path, we had to remember to bike on the left.. and the walking path is completely separate (on the right of this picture) so you don't get run over by bikes.



Of course we had to get a jump photo on the coastline. This is the 2nd photo of like 4 because the local guy who was taking the picture wasn't very experienced with capturing jump pictures.



We ate some more of the actual ice cream sandwiches... with a slice of sweet green and pink bread and a block of ice cream inbetween :)



Then we biked more down the coast and down a canal. And yes, the water was equally as dirty in the canal.







We also tried the famous East Coast chili crab at Jumbo! Well, I didn't really because I don't like spicy foods, but Holly and Chris did.



Okay, now my post is updated!

Yo Quiero Taco Bell

Yesterday, someone from our study abroad group was really craving Taco Bell, so he looked it up on Google Maps and emailed the whole group about it. We met downstairs and took a bus to Harbor Front, then took the MRT train to Clarke Quay, then walked to the Funan DigitaLife Center.

According to this link on Google Maps, it was somewhere within the 6 story mall, but we couldn't find it on any of the floors or in the surrounding area. And every single person that we asked had absolutely no idea what we were talking about. We spent about 2 hours traveling to this shopping center and searching for the Taco Bell without any luck... epic fail.

We ended up eating at a small sushi place instead, that had pretty boring and basic traditional Japanese rolls only. I really miss Rusans, I can't wait to get back and go there one last time to celebrate my birthday AND graduation :)

So today, I did a little researching on Taco Bell and found this on Answers.com:

"Taco Bell in Singapore existed for a number of years, mostly as combination stores with KFC such as the one that operated at the Funan Digital Life Mall, but in 2008 they completely pulled out of Singapore."

Moral of the story: Google Maps is NOT always right! (At least its still better than Mapquest and Yahoo though.)

The Mantoux Test and Shopping on Bugis Street

This morning, I woke up and left for the NUS Health Center to get my PPD test for the Peace Corps medical clearance paperwork stuff. After getting on the wrong bus as usual that took me the long way to the Health Center, I had to wait impatiently for another 20 minutes at the Registration desk while the receptionists struggled to locate my files and check me in.

If the Health Center Registration desk has 4 computers and 4 people who work as receptionists, why don't they take the effort to train all of those people to adequately handle files and patients registration? They were so slow because all 4 of them had to work on just 1 person's individual registration at a time. And it wasn't like there were any difficulties with registration, it was silly things like one of the printers malfunctioning or the fact that they assumed my name was Li Jing.

Fact: one of the things that makes me really irritated is when someone mispronounces my name, calls me Li Jing or miss-spells my name as a variety of things (which include Ling Ji and Ji Ling). You would think that with only 6 letters, there wouldn't be that many permuations and combinations of the spellings of my name. But no, people are absolutely ridiculous sometimes.

Anyways, the cashier at the Health Center proceeded to tell me that the fee for the Mantoux test for TB was now $30 SGD, not the $20 that she quoted me for on Wednesday because fees increased literally overnight. Somehow, I find that very strange to believe... but there was nothing I could do about it, except go back to my dorm room to get more cash since I didn't have enough cash with me and they do not accept any other form of payment.

After more waiting, a nurse administered the Mantoux shot in my arm and told me to come back in exactly 72 hours - meaning 10:30am on Monday. I have class until 11am, so that means that I won't get over there until probably 11:30 but oh well, I'm sure that it will be fine. I read the Wikipedia article just to make sure that it would be sufficient medical documentation for the Peace Corps to accept. I am going to be extremely pissed off if they do not accept it... and if I ever have to set foot in the NUS Health Center again after Monday.

After the whole Health Center fiasco, I went shopping downtown on Bugis Street. Its a really crazy little shopping center with a ton of small stands like Chinatown, its supposedly the largest shopping district in Singapore! Most of the stuff is cheap clothes and trinkets like watches and touristy souvenirs.



Singapore hosted a F1 race in 2008 at night, and they have this big ad right by the entrance to the Bugis Street shops. And yes, I took this picture while crossing the street like a true tourist.



Remember when Baby-G watches were super trendy? This ad in the train station made me laugh.