ql, ql, o wherefore art thou ql?

oops. i haven't posted in a whole 12 days!

here's a wrap up on what i've been up to, the little imp.

since my last post...surprise surprise! i've had had about 8 or so presentations!! yeah, nothing to be excited about. first i must admit my shock at the naivety of some of the exchange students here. take for example, one of the presentations for a class to design a product for the elderly. one main point was raised by this guy, whom we shall call A. he claims that the elderly are resistant to learning new technology and use the keyboard, and his product is a high-tech tv like thingy that allows one to make phone calls, video calls, chat, twitter like features and other online social networking site features. my question here is: don't u think your product is contradicting your claim? if that is the case, how can you expect it to sell well, or before we even question that, how can you expect your targeted users to even want to use it? puzzles me.

we also had another presentation on Topics on Japan (TOJ). my group did on Mannerism in Japan, and as our motto dictates, we're out to have fun. so we did. we presented it in a gameshow style whereby random classmates (u are allowed to doubt the definition of RANDOM, considering that i came up with the idea *wink wink*) are selected to represent team A and B respectively, and to answer the questions that yours truly came up with. for those of u who know me, i am probably not known for coming up with simple questions but i decided to be nice this time and i actually came up with moderate questions. japan has made me a nicer guy. RANT WARNING: the previous group took too much freaking time (not to mention their horrendously dry content and some even had a really pathetic presentation style) so we ended up with about 2/3 of our allocated time. THANKS. not one to back away from challenges, i'm most glad to say that our group rose to the occasion (the AC way) and i believe it was a well received one :D

my next presentation (i tend to overlook minor presentations) would be the long anticipated industrial analysis competition held within my laboratory and conducted at Hakone. you could expect how fun it was. before the actual presentation, we had a terrible 2 weeks of working till way past midnight daily to collect information blablabla. if u don't understand the pain, try looking up for study journals, magazines, scholastic papers...etc. the catch is, do that in japanese. not exactly the easiest of tasks, even for someone who likes using the japanese language such as myself. when the dust settled, we produced (miraculously) a piece of work i would rate as 52/100. my job, besides researching on the articles, was to plan the project flow i.e. the logic of our project. my 2 teammates would be doing the bulk of the research and also the powerpoint presentation. on a side note, we had the least number of people (growl). the night before the presentation, we had a good kaiseki dinner (pics will not be provided here, check out my facebook albums!), followed by a nice onsen (hot spring) bath. my fren, ken, heard some girls' voices from the guys' bath and he tried to peek to no avail. awwww. try again next time, ken :D next up was karaoke (muaahahahaha) and u'll be surprised to learn that our professor joined us for all these activities. amazing. this was followed by a party till 3 am (we played plenty of games such as saboteur, cockroach poker) and everyone knocked out. some of those guys got really drunk, but thankfully, i controlled myself and i was sober. very sober. got up the next day to a nice buffet breakfast and *drumroll* here comes the real thing. i'll skip the details and go straight to the result, cos that's what u're waiting to hear (read) and that's what i'm dying to boast/brag about.

WE BAGGED THE TOP PRIZE AND BEAT THE OTHER GROUPS BY AROUND 20 POINTS EACH!!!

as a result, my group's getting a treat to high class sushi at GINZA soon :D

alright, time to end things on a high note. GOODNIGHT!
i'll continue another day hehehehe