27 Jan 2019 - The "Grand" and the "Great" Gathering

We celebrated my grandmother's birthday today at Ganso Manekineko KTV.  It's the time of the year where all her children, grand children and great grand children gather.  The strength of her great grand children has grown over the years.  I believe more will be added moving forward.

外婆，祝您生日快乐，身体健康！

26 Jan 2019 - Edusave Good Progress Award

In the past 2 years, Javier had received the CDC-CCC Education Merit Award for his good academic results.  Today, he is once again receiving an award, but a different one.  He's receiving Edusave Good Progress Award for improvement in his academic results and demonstrating good conduct.  Unlike in the past where the award ceremony was held in Community Club, this time it's held in the Club House at our place.

Other than the award, the prize that he received is also different.  Instead of $80 Popular book voucher that he got for past 2 years, this time round it was a $100 cash cheque.

Well done once again, Javier!  Keep it up!

25 Jan 2019 - My Little Princess has turned 12!

Today is Jerlene's 12 years old birthday.  My little princess is no longer little.  Not just her age, but also her height as she is almost as tall as her mommy now.  Time really flies and the image of me carrying her in one hand 12 years ago is still very fresh in my mind.  Now even using two hands to carry her will be difficult.

We bought a cake for her and had a mini celebration together with my parents, sister and her family.

Jerlene, I hope you had enjoyed your birthday and may your wish comes true.  12 years old is a very important year because in a few months time, you will be busy preparing for your PSLE examination.  Having said that, do find time to enjoy yourself as it is equally important to have a balanced lifestyle.

I started blogging when Jerlene was borned.  In other words, I have been blogging consistently for 12 years.  Though it's a lot of hard work and took up a substantial amount of my time, I enjoyed it.  Every time when I looked back at those earlier blog posts, I will put on a smile uncontrollably.  So glad that I've captured all those moments.  :-)

14 Jan 2019 - Leaders of Tomorrow

Notice something extra on Javier's shirt collar?  Yes it's a badge that identifies a student as a Student Councillor.  Javier had gone for the necessary briefing and training in the past week.  Today was his first time performing his duty as a Student Councillor.  According to Javier, every Student Councillor has an area of focus on top of all the generic assignment.  His focus is in the area of "Health" so whenever there is any activity related to Health, he may be called in to help out.

Hopefully with this, he will learn and improve on his leadership skill which is very essential when entering into the work force.  Good job!

13 Jan 2019 - New assignment during Taekwando grading

As Javier had passed his Junior Black Belt grading three month ago, he had a new assignment in today's grading.  He was playing the role as one of the assistant coaches during warm-up.  While those going for grading were practicing their patterns, he went around "correcting" their mistakes and even demonstrated the correct moves.  It's amazing that he could still remember the patterns for all the different colour belts.

Today's grading was held at Jurong East Sports Hall.

Other than being an assistant coach, he had been practising to be a referee during sparring.  However, he did not get a chance to be one today as there were too many full black belts around.  Maybe next time.

5 Jan 2019 - Mastering Scratch 3.0 in hours

This afternoon, I noticed Javier was busy typing in front of his computer desktop.  Based on the way he typed, he did not seem to be playing games.  So I went over and asked what he was doing.  He told me that Scratch just released a new version and he was trying out all the new features.  In the new Scratch 3.0, there are many new features such as
- New Paint Editor and Sound Editor
- Pen, Video Sensing and Music blocks
- New fonts
- New extension: Text to Speech, Translate, Micro:bit
- and more.....
Within few hours, Javier created a few games making use of some of the new features.  It's great to see that he has so much passion in Scratch programming and continue to "upgrade" himself with all the new knowledge.

By the way, I have not been monitoring his progress in Scratch programming and I'm very surprised when I saw that he had already published 85 projects so far.  I tried looking into his projects to see how he coded those games but I'm totally lost.  It's so complicated that I no longer understand his coding.  In fact, some of his projects contain a few hundred scripts!  Being his beta tester, what amazes me is that whenever I found some programming defects, he knows exactly where went wrong and fixed it immediately.

Well done, Javier!  Keep it up!

1 Jan 2019 - Happy New Year to all and Goodbye Analog TV!

First of all, I would like to wish everyone a very HAPPY and PROSPEROUS 2019!

One major event that happened tonight was the "death" of Analog TV.  I stayed up late tonight just to catch this "once in a lifetime" moment.

Below shows my TV screen at 2359hrs when there was still pictures.

At 0001hrs sharp, the screen simply blacked out and that marked the end of Analog TV era, at least in Singapore.  :~(