jumping on the cors-bashing bandwagon

After a quick browse through some other people's blogs, the common thread that unites them all is, no prizes for guessing, the $%@#* (haha condemning the cors system with CORS language - geddit???) cors system. I think i shall not bash the system per se (not in the least cos so many people have done it far better than i ever could, judging from a quick search at technorati.com, but i shall relate my own annoyances with the tutorial bidding process today, knowing full well that me and the thousands of others who similarly suffered through looking at the "sorry, the server is currently unavailable" and other similar messages on our computer screens have little, if any avenues for reCORS *haha i just had to do that*

I lugged my so-called lightweight laptop today especially to bid for tutorial slots, and didn't think twice about any possible problems that i may have encountered, since as far as i can remember, i had little, if any trouble whatsoever indicating my preferences during the last two sems...

So i really dunno what may have accounted for the almighty cock-up that was today's exercise. Are the freshies this year really that kiasu, such that they have to be reminded that this is not a first-come-first-served exercise? I really didn't care at all last year... no lah, but even if this year's batch of freshies is the ultra-ks type (there was one particular guy in front of me during lecture who obviously contributed in his own small part to the jam - managing to log on, but leaving it like that for much of the remaining duration of the lecture, depriving at least one desparate other {like me, for example... =P} the ability to log on in the process) the onus should still be on the dear cors team (who must be having a whole lot to answer to now to the folks upstairs...) to anticipate such things and take the necessary preCORSionary (heehee=) measures.

And really, eight hours for thousands and thousands of students? Were they trying to attempt a modern-day miracle, like say "the cors team caters to the multitudes hungry for their main CORS (ok admit that one's plain lame...) in eight short hours, and still have miraculously more than enough leftover capacity on the server, and leave everyone happy and contented, praising the cors system till no end"? The fact that (at latest count) the time has been pushed back till nine am tomorrow morning is real rotten egg on the faces of the cors people.

I also am a little embarassed, cos the very idea for this confusing and overtly ridiculous system in the first place reportedly came from the history department at arts fac... *hangs head in shame*

On a more upbeat note, today i went for dinner with the family at Shahi Maharani, this rather upmarket North Indian restaurant at Raffles City. The food was rather good actually, but as usual, i only remember the negative parts...

1) I was happily tucking in to what i thought was the Chicken Tikka Masala that i ordered, only to hear my brother ask me "since when did you eat prawns?" They gave us the prawns instead of the chicken... I nearly puked there and then... But honestly, i couldn't taste or smell any prawn whatsoever (and trust me, usually i am as good in sniffing out seafood as those french pigs are in sniffing out truffles), probably due to the abundance of spices that they put in... Not bad lah, if i ever were to eat prawns, i would choose to eat them this way, when i can't even detect them...

2) The dessert (i forget the name - it's the round dough ball in a VERY VERY sweet syrup) was stewed for a very long while with some cardamon pods (which i can't stand too), which totally spoilt it for me after one spoon...

But all in all a good dining experience lah, i can't complain on a full stomach anyway...