The one that didn’t get away

If there’s anything I dislike, it’s being wronged for something I didn’t do, or people trying to pull a fast one on me.

When I was a prefect in Secondary School, we were not allowed to bring food and drinks back to our classrooms. I spotted this guy trying to sneak a drink and I nicely told him to consume the drink in the canteen. He went back to the canteen and I later happened to spot him attempting to leave the canteen by a different route.

Being sufficiently annoyed, I tracked him to his classroom and promptly booked him for that “offence”. He was similarly annoyed that I actually bothered to track him down. Well, I was just doing my job that day…

The discus accident

A little known fact is that I was the House Captain during my days in Secondary School. Unfortunately, an accident happened during my watch when one fo the boys got too enthusiastic and started practising his discus throws in an open field! One of the boys got a glancing blow to his head and all of us were horrified when the blood began to stream down. Thank goodness it was not a serious accident…

Console Games at the ‘hood

Back then before arcades starting sprouting up all over Singapore (and are now nearly going extinct), me and my friends used to patronise this games shop near our homes where they rented out games consoles by the hour and we had our pick of games!

Quite a bit of time was spent at the shop, but it was a cheap way to play multiple games without spending a wad of cash!

486 DX2 66MHz

It’s amazing that my second PC was considered to be quite a powerful machine during its time… It was “revolutionary” in the sense that this was the first class of Intel processors released to the mainstream where the math coprocessor was combined with the main processor. Previously the math coprocessors had to be bought separately.

Fast forward to today, 2 cores are already common while 4 cores are probably looming on the horizon for the mainstream…

My first PC

The first PC I owned was a 286 PC that had a dubious “Turbo” function that could speed up from 8MHz to 36MHz. Putting that aside, it was a PC that I was quite happy with as it could handle DOS 4.0 with ease. IIRC, it came with a humongous 20MB HDD. I can’t remember exactly how much RAM it came with though… Must be some pathetically small amount by today’s standards.

The airfield

There was this guy in class who was prone to profanities — let’s call him “A”.

One day, it turned out that he was trying to be a good boy and paying attention in class while the rest of us were horsing around. We actually created a paper plane out of the centerspread of a newspaper and flew it during geography class!

“A” was incensed and he shouted, “Hey! You think this place is an airfield?” Unfortunately for him, the teacher thought he said “‘F’ You!” instead of “airfield”, so he ended up having some explaining to do…

Saturday ball game

A bunch of my classmates, YL, IW, LFW, etc. used to get together every Saturday at the CPE (College of Physical Education) to play basketball. After hours of sweating it out in the morning, we would adjourn to the nearby A&W’s and indulge in some fried chicken. I remember once we even went to Serene Centre to gorge on cheeseburgers — think there was a $1 cheeseburger promo that Macs ran back then…