Aha after long last I am here. Lets see what we did last week. Oh the stamps and letter thing. Sheesh In the end there was this problem because the letters had specific names in it then i only put the envelopes with names and stamps. So I felt quite bad >< cause I had piano already. But I specifically asked if they were in any order! Ah well mom calls.
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
Monday, July 9, 2007
Update on past few weeks!
Since this reflections blog has been 'dead' for more than a month, I'll be providing the update on the past two weeks.
We went around delivering brochures for one week and for the last two weeks we did some brochure editing. The Substation seems to be extremely dependent on brochures, as the lack of funding sort of disables the use of commercials, which would also be impractical. However, I feel that their publicity needs to be worked on.
For example, most conversations about RE topics go like this.
A: What's your RE-SL organization?
B: Er. Substation.
A: Huh?
B: It's sort of like an arts house promoting local talents.
A: Oh really? Where is it?
B: Funan there.
A: Got meh?
And so on...
Secondly, we got to work in the 'Random Room' which was actually really really fun. There was a music player, biscuits and lots of tea! Lipton tea! Tea motivated Andrew and I to work until 6pm or so, when we normally only stayed till 5++.

And lastly, it seems our RE proposal has had a stroke of luck. We were recently told that they were also planning to paint the classrooms this year, so we sort of came just in time. We are currently waiting for a reply, so keep your fingers crossed!
p.s. change the background and add a tagboard! =(
We went around delivering brochures for one week and for the last two weeks we did some brochure editing. The Substation seems to be extremely dependent on brochures, as the lack of funding sort of disables the use of commercials, which would also be impractical. However, I feel that their publicity needs to be worked on.
For example, most conversations about RE topics go like this.
A: What's your RE-SL organization?
B: Er. Substation.
A: Huh?
B: It's sort of like an arts house promoting local talents.
A: Oh really? Where is it?
B: Funan there.
A: Got meh?
And so on...
Secondly, we got to work in the 'Random Room' which was actually really really fun. There was a music player, biscuits and lots of tea! Lipton tea! Tea motivated Andrew and I to work until 6pm or so, when we normally only stayed till 5++.
And lastly, it seems our RE proposal has had a stroke of luck. We were recently told that they were also planning to paint the classrooms this year, so we sort of came just in time. We are currently waiting for a reply, so keep your fingers crossed!
p.s. change the background and add a tagboard! =(
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
23 May Update
Ok I shall make this really brief, because today I randomly took quite a lot of pictures, so I shall upload them here. When we redesign this site during the holidays, we will find the right places for them, but right now, here they are. Ohya geocities is one site with some attitude problem.. sometimes the pictures wont come out and sometimes they might, so pray :) and wait until I find better webspace.
Yeah, so anyway, when we arrived at substation, Michael and Brent continued sorting the files (we started last week), and Joshua and I went to key in data regarding some film competition of some sort. Using the old Mac was quite hard, especially since I use windows, and everything is alien. However, Joshua and I got quite a lot of work done, and managed to finish keying in data, synopsises and filmmaker biographies into a very annoying excel file.
Michael and Brent left at 3, so Joshua and I took turns typing and sorting. Here's Joshua hard at work typing :) :) :)
Note: Images are scaled down. Full sized images are also avaliable, but this is something like a preview :)




Haha. After many long hours, we also finished sorting the huge stack of files.



You won't believe how many files there were until you see it yourself, and here are 2 pictures!
Ok, before we left, Joshua and I took some pictures of a Substation classroom, which we are planning to repaint. Will post them next time.
Stuff left to do:
1. proposal
2. report
3. redesign this ugly site.
Yeah, so anyway, when we arrived at substation, Michael and Brent continued sorting the files (we started last week), and Joshua and I went to key in data regarding some film competition of some sort. Using the old Mac was quite hard, especially since I use windows, and everything is alien. However, Joshua and I got quite a lot of work done, and managed to finish keying in data, synopsises and filmmaker biographies into a very annoying excel file.
Michael and Brent left at 3, so Joshua and I took turns typing and sorting. Here's Joshua hard at work typing :) :) :)
Note: Images are scaled down. Full sized images are also avaliable, but this is something like a preview :)
Haha. After many long hours, we also finished sorting the huge stack of files.
You won't believe how many files there were until you see it yourself, and here are 2 pictures!
Ok, before we left, Joshua and I took some pictures of a Substation classroom, which we are planning to repaint. Will post them next time.
Stuff left to do:
1. proposal
2. report
3. redesign this ugly site.
yay.
Friday, May 18, 2007
16th May
Yay just to add on to Brent's earlier post in case it isn't too comprehensible :) But give him due credit, at least he's updating unlike ahem ahem Michael who hasn't even joined this blog. Ok, so when we reached Substation, the first thing we did was to move a marble table into the office. Strange? Yeah, apparently the table can come apart into two pieces as well. Haha.
Ok, anyway, Brent and I went off to a cute Singapore Arts Festival booth with green broomsticks on the roof (somewhere outside Raffles City), and we delivered a few stacks of Substation brochures there. After that, we went back to substation, where we saw Michael deliberating whether he should go to Orchard Road with Chris and Belle from the box office. To be honest, it was quite irritating, and frankly I think Chris and Belle were a bit irritated with Michael, since he wasted their time coming up with lame excuses not to go. Of course, a piano lesson at 4 is not much of a lame excuse, but taking into account that he can't reach home by 4 even if he leaves substation at the normal 3.15 school dismissal time, it IS quite annoying to us, since he keeps leaving early and hence "excusing" himself from doing SL.
Even after we decided that Michael should go to Orchard, Michael wasted even more time upstairs in the office begging for one of us to replace him, but we would not simply because #1 it was his job and we had other jobs upstairs, which #2 he would leave undone since he was leaving early, and #3 he was always coming up with excuses to not do work, and we were quite annoyed at that point in time. It's an accumalated thing. :S
Ok, anyway, Brent and I got to work with sorting this huge, huge pile of old documents, sorting them into various piles for letters, programme details etc. Since Joshua was leaving, he showed me how to make the calls to schools to inform them of the change of price in the Reel Revolution Seminar, and then Joshua sorted paper with Brent for a while before he went back to school for his new CCA, BB.
Calling schools was quite a hard job. In 3 hours, I only managed to call about 50 schools, up to schools beginning with G. I mostly had fun with the school's automated answering machine system, and pressing 0 or 5 or 1 for the general office was one of the fun perks in the otherwise boring job. I had a really bad time calling ACSI and ACS BR, because the office staff were just rude and irritating.
For example, when I called ACSI. I was going in my politetess-sounding voice: Hi, I'm calling from the substation and... and the ACSI general office lady would scream into the phone in this malay accent "CALLING FROM WHERE? I CANNOT HEAR YOU SAY AGAIN?" After repeating a few times, I finally got to my next line, "Last week we sent a fax to your school about the Reel Revolution Seminar, could I ask if you have received that fax?" The ACSI lady promply barked back in this caustic voice: "YOU ASK ME LIKE THAT I CAN TELL YOU HONESTLY.... I DON'T KNOW. BYE." --
The call to ACS barker was more or less the same, but I was also quite impressed with some of the general office staff in the less prominent schools such as Bowen, where the office lady patiently explained to me how the staff was busy because they had just finished the exams, and if I'm not wrong, St Nicholas, where the general office lady spent 10 or more minutes searching for the relevant staff for film-related activities.
I also learnt quite a lot about faxes through this long, arduous process. The most common question I faced was "Attention to who?" I found out that in faxes to organisations, you have to write "attention: person's name", or it will probably get thrashed. Heh, maybe that will be relevant in the future, but I guess not. Faxes are outdated. :)
After that reaching the Great G milestone, I helped Brent finish sorting the huge pile of documents, and Brent found $20. Someone from substation (forgot the name!) gave us $10 to buy something and they kept the other half, so Brent and I rewarded ourself with sickeningly sweet Milo freezy from Cheers :D
Cheers!
Ok, anyway, Brent and I went off to a cute Singapore Arts Festival booth with green broomsticks on the roof (somewhere outside Raffles City), and we delivered a few stacks of Substation brochures there. After that, we went back to substation, where we saw Michael deliberating whether he should go to Orchard Road with Chris and Belle from the box office. To be honest, it was quite irritating, and frankly I think Chris and Belle were a bit irritated with Michael, since he wasted their time coming up with lame excuses not to go. Of course, a piano lesson at 4 is not much of a lame excuse, but taking into account that he can't reach home by 4 even if he leaves substation at the normal 3.15 school dismissal time, it IS quite annoying to us, since he keeps leaving early and hence "excusing" himself from doing SL.
Even after we decided that Michael should go to Orchard, Michael wasted even more time upstairs in the office begging for one of us to replace him, but we would not simply because #1 it was his job and we had other jobs upstairs, which #2 he would leave undone since he was leaving early, and #3 he was always coming up with excuses to not do work, and we were quite annoyed at that point in time. It's an accumalated thing. :S
Ok, anyway, Brent and I got to work with sorting this huge, huge pile of old documents, sorting them into various piles for letters, programme details etc. Since Joshua was leaving, he showed me how to make the calls to schools to inform them of the change of price in the Reel Revolution Seminar, and then Joshua sorted paper with Brent for a while before he went back to school for his new CCA, BB.
Calling schools was quite a hard job. In 3 hours, I only managed to call about 50 schools, up to schools beginning with G. I mostly had fun with the school's automated answering machine system, and pressing 0 or 5 or 1 for the general office was one of the fun perks in the otherwise boring job. I had a really bad time calling ACSI and ACS BR, because the office staff were just rude and irritating.
For example, when I called ACSI. I was going in my politetess-sounding voice: Hi, I'm calling from the substation and... and the ACSI general office lady would scream into the phone in this malay accent "CALLING FROM WHERE? I CANNOT HEAR YOU SAY AGAIN?" After repeating a few times, I finally got to my next line, "Last week we sent a fax to your school about the Reel Revolution Seminar, could I ask if you have received that fax?" The ACSI lady promply barked back in this caustic voice: "YOU ASK ME LIKE THAT I CAN TELL YOU HONESTLY.... I DON'T KNOW. BYE." --
The call to ACS barker was more or less the same, but I was also quite impressed with some of the general office staff in the less prominent schools such as Bowen, where the office lady patiently explained to me how the staff was busy because they had just finished the exams, and if I'm not wrong, St Nicholas, where the general office lady spent 10 or more minutes searching for the relevant staff for film-related activities.
I also learnt quite a lot about faxes through this long, arduous process. The most common question I faced was "Attention to who?" I found out that in faxes to organisations, you have to write "attention: person's name", or it will probably get thrashed. Heh, maybe that will be relevant in the future, but I guess not. Faxes are outdated. :)
After that reaching the Great G milestone, I helped Brent finish sorting the huge pile of documents, and Brent found $20. Someone from substation (forgot the name!) gave us $10 to buy something and they kept the other half, so Brent and I rewarded ourself with sickeningly sweet Milo freezy from Cheers :D
Cheers!
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
16.05.07
today, we went to the substation as usual. as we entered the office, we encounted a strange guy who we did not know. we never found out who he was>.< they were rearranging the office, or at least they brought in a new(?) table. so myke and josh started calling schools while me and andrew went to a place near city hall to deliver flyers. as i am unable to spell the name of the place, i shall not attempt to. anyway when we got back, myke was in the middle of making a hard decision of going home or going with the substation people to orchard road. of course, he chose home. then me and andrew called and sorted until abt 5.30. after finding 20 dollars in an old file, the substation people gave us dollars each to buy coffee for our hard work. hurray! i wonder if they need painting.
-brent-
-brent-
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
erm
andrew can u add michael to the list of contributors...
also can u add a tagboard so ez-er to communicate.
i'll finish the table thing by today
-joshua
also can u add a tagboard so ez-er to communicate.
i'll finish the table thing by today
-joshua
Friday, April 6, 2007
4/4
Haha, ok, I shall update the blog now. Since Brent and Michael did the pasting stuff, and Joshua and I only spent a few minutes doing that, Brent please post sth about it :) Ok, so anyway, last week, we were busy packaging and mailing Substation monthly brochures to various people and schools. Instead of mailing, Joshua and I were supposed to manually deliever stacks of these brochures to places of the arts in the vicinity.
There were, if I'm not wrong, 8 places that we were supposed to go to, and went (in order of visitation):
1. National Library
2. YMS
3. Sculpture Square
4. TTHP
5. Arts House
6. Victoria Theatre
7. MITA Building.
8. National Museum
It was a tiring, arduous job, which took about 2 hours to complete, so basically, I shall describe the process (?) :)
Haha ok, so. Coming out of substation, Joshua and I walked along Victoria St all the way to Carlton Hotel, where I told Joshua that I would run to the library from there, while he stayed at Carlton Hotel, in a bid to save time. Instead of "saving time", I ended up wasting at least 20 minutes trying to get he brochures delivered. This was because on arrival, I went up all the way to the 5th floor, only to find the drama center locked. Little did I know that I was supposed to pass the brochures to some person in the stage door, which is in some obscure location which I did not know about. :( Anyway, at the stage door, the security guard called some person working at the drama center down to pick up the brochures, and he took 10 minutes to come down, which was stupid.
Anyway, after that, we walked on the narrow pathway across Chijmes, past the Art Museum, where we bumped into some gansterish softballers, who jokingly threatened to bash us up since we were from RI. Like... what is your problems??? We igonored them and continued walking, all the way until Catholic Welfare society, which was 54 Waterloo St. We were supposed to deliver some brochures to YMS at 55 Waterloo St, and we were frantically looking up and down the road wondering whether the building on the left or right of CWS was the right place. The thing was, YMS was across the street, staring at our face. :)
We continued our journey down Waterloo St, and easily found sculpture square. Joshua went in alone, so I'm not really sure what happened. We went all the way to the end of Waterloo St and found a Stamford Arts House, at the same address as the supposed TTPH, which, we found out, was on the 2nd floor of the eerie, deserted, crumbling old building.
After that, we were too lazy to walk all the way to Arts House, so we took 166 from the nearby Bencoolen St all the way to Funan Centre, where we walked in to Arts House, and dumped the brochures. A bit further down the road was Victoria Theatre and VCH. Unfortunately, VCH rejected our Substation brochures, as "they weren't from Sistic", which was a little depressing.
Walking tiredly along Singapore River, we plodded all the way to the MITA building, the one with the colourful windows. I almost died of shock when I caught a glimpse of the words "Hill Street Police Station" on the front of where I thought was MITA building. (bear in mind that I was leading Joshua around to places which I knew how to get to, but purely by instinct; no map :P) Luckily, MITA building WAS formely the Hill Street Police Station. Haha. Joshua exchanged his ezlink card for a visitor pass and went up to the 3rd floor to deliver brochures to Nac, and we had fun slotting brochures on the numerous pillars in the MITA lobby.
Finally, we jogged back to the Subsation area, towards our final desination, National Museum. In our haste to get there, we even used some of our OBS skills and bashed across this big grassy hill instead of taking the long, windy main road. (In a slight error, I had wanted to go there first, since it was the closest, but I forgot about it and we went off to the Library instead.) It proved to be a blessing in disguise, as the Museum was fitted with HUGE airconditioning pipes, which, as the name suggests, pipes in cool air dierectly, instead of coming through a vent. We spend a good couple of minutes cooling ourselves in front of it, before we briskwalked through the museum to the front desk.
Getting back was a small problem, and required us to get over a couple of road dividers etc, but we finally made it through and reached Substation at about 4.15. To our slight dismay, Brent and Michael had conveniently NOT finished their jobs, and Joshua and I had to finish up. After that, we walked to the Philatelic museum to post these letters, and we were done for the day.
In an effort to make up for Michael's possible absence during the holidays, we are thinking of roping in a purely volunteer member, Shao Zhongren from 3L, who has agreed to help us during holidays. However, this move has not been approved yet, so we shall wait in anxiety with every hope that this will be allowed. :)
There were, if I'm not wrong, 8 places that we were supposed to go to, and went (in order of visitation):
1. National Library
2. YMS
3. Sculpture Square
4. TTHP
5. Arts House
6. Victoria Theatre
7. MITA Building.
8. National Museum
It was a tiring, arduous job, which took about 2 hours to complete, so basically, I shall describe the process (?) :)
Haha ok, so. Coming out of substation, Joshua and I walked along Victoria St all the way to Carlton Hotel, where I told Joshua that I would run to the library from there, while he stayed at Carlton Hotel, in a bid to save time. Instead of "saving time", I ended up wasting at least 20 minutes trying to get he brochures delivered. This was because on arrival, I went up all the way to the 5th floor, only to find the drama center locked. Little did I know that I was supposed to pass the brochures to some person in the stage door, which is in some obscure location which I did not know about. :( Anyway, at the stage door, the security guard called some person working at the drama center down to pick up the brochures, and he took 10 minutes to come down, which was stupid.
Anyway, after that, we walked on the narrow pathway across Chijmes, past the Art Museum, where we bumped into some gansterish softballers, who jokingly threatened to bash us up since we were from RI. Like... what is your problems??? We igonored them and continued walking, all the way until Catholic Welfare society, which was 54 Waterloo St. We were supposed to deliver some brochures to YMS at 55 Waterloo St, and we were frantically looking up and down the road wondering whether the building on the left or right of CWS was the right place. The thing was, YMS was across the street, staring at our face. :)
We continued our journey down Waterloo St, and easily found sculpture square. Joshua went in alone, so I'm not really sure what happened. We went all the way to the end of Waterloo St and found a Stamford Arts House, at the same address as the supposed TTPH, which, we found out, was on the 2nd floor of the eerie, deserted, crumbling old building.
After that, we were too lazy to walk all the way to Arts House, so we took 166 from the nearby Bencoolen St all the way to Funan Centre, where we walked in to Arts House, and dumped the brochures. A bit further down the road was Victoria Theatre and VCH. Unfortunately, VCH rejected our Substation brochures, as "they weren't from Sistic", which was a little depressing.
Walking tiredly along Singapore River, we plodded all the way to the MITA building, the one with the colourful windows. I almost died of shock when I caught a glimpse of the words "Hill Street Police Station" on the front of where I thought was MITA building. (bear in mind that I was leading Joshua around to places which I knew how to get to, but purely by instinct; no map :P) Luckily, MITA building WAS formely the Hill Street Police Station. Haha. Joshua exchanged his ezlink card for a visitor pass and went up to the 3rd floor to deliver brochures to Nac, and we had fun slotting brochures on the numerous pillars in the MITA lobby.
Finally, we jogged back to the Subsation area, towards our final desination, National Museum. In our haste to get there, we even used some of our OBS skills and bashed across this big grassy hill instead of taking the long, windy main road. (In a slight error, I had wanted to go there first, since it was the closest, but I forgot about it and we went off to the Library instead.) It proved to be a blessing in disguise, as the Museum was fitted with HUGE airconditioning pipes, which, as the name suggests, pipes in cool air dierectly, instead of coming through a vent. We spend a good couple of minutes cooling ourselves in front of it, before we briskwalked through the museum to the front desk.
Getting back was a small problem, and required us to get over a couple of road dividers etc, but we finally made it through and reached Substation at about 4.15. To our slight dismay, Brent and Michael had conveniently NOT finished their jobs, and Joshua and I had to finish up. After that, we walked to the Philatelic museum to post these letters, and we were done for the day.
In an effort to make up for Michael's possible absence during the holidays, we are thinking of roping in a purely volunteer member, Shao Zhongren from 3L, who has agreed to help us during holidays. However, this move has not been approved yet, so we shall wait in anxiety with every hope that this will be allowed. :)