Transfigurational Thinking

Today was the dreaded CTW oral defense session, where I would have to answer two supposedly tough questions that my tutor would ask me. Surprisingly, or by mere chance of luck, I think I got the two easiest questions among those in my group. "Why did you choose this topic?" is certainly much easier to answer than most other questions which go like "How would you improve on your position paper?" or "Where do you draw the line between censorship and stepping over the line?". Ok, in case this sounds alien to most of you, the oral defense session requires me and my group mates to each answer one question pertaining to the position paper which we prepared, entitled "Developing Singapore as an Education Hub City". In our paper, we presented two points which we felt were hindering Singapore's drive to become an education hub, namely the lack of space in Singapore to set up new campuses and also the lack of academic freedom. Anyway, it's all history now, and I can start putting this assignment behind me. Looking back, it was really fun (albeit stressful) to complete this assignment, having to stay up late into the night faking survey results and looking for "legitimate" sources to support our claims. Working with Josh and Andy turned out to be a very fun experience, especially when we were working together at Central Forum, sitting behind the laptop and shooting off ideas. There were times when we would just stop working and turn to talking cock. That's how good our team chemistry was. So, guys, thanks for the great working experience, and let’s hope we all get at least a B+ for our finals!One project down, one more to go. I'm still stuck on my second project, which is for entrepreneurial marketing. For this project, my team is supposed to come up with a complete marketing strategy for a fictitious business (not so in our team's case. One of our group members is really going to set up his own business using the product he suggested), and present it to venture capitalists (our lecturer-lah). Our product is (bear with me) Rapid Testing Environment Deployment Software (told you it was long). Even after working on this project for 3 months plus, I still have a very quaint idea of what this software does. Well, such things work both ways, as other people from other groups also seem to be clueless about this product. Hence, this bodes well for us since they can only sit and stare and (hopefully) be impressed. The only person who truly understands the software is of course my project mate who designed the software himself.
For this project, the final presentation will need us to really make an impact on the professor, as the previous groups did a really first-class presentation. There was this one group, who were proposing a modernized herbal food & drink shop, who actually provided the professor with herbal jelly, herbal tea, and God knows what else during their entire presentation. Lucky guy. Hence, in following with the trend, out group, although we are an IT company, decided to give our most beloved professor some "gifts" to win his favour (and an A for us!). So far we have come up with t-shirt, pen, paperweight, calendar and notebook. Madness. I was assigned to create a paperweight for the professor, using a ROCK. It's those kind of smooth rocks which you can find at the bottom of koi ponds. Don't ask me where I got the rock, because I'm not liable to say at the moment. Let's just say it wasn't stolen. So, now, I'm cracking my head, thinking how to turn the rock into a paperweight, short of having to use some transfiguration magic. I could use some help from our dear Harry Potter right now. Oh well, I'll just have to use my own imagination. This is a true marketing lesson though, as I'm trying to create a "ten dollar effect using only one dollar"(in the exact words of Prof. Andrew Ng).
One more thing, about my blog, I've decided to name it Innocence Lost, because it sounds provocative (right?). Try typing "Innocence Lost" into Google, and see what you get. I assure you it's not my blog. It's something more...interesting.