{while true} HELLO WORLD {end while}

It's a privilege to have this opportunity to share & engage fellow SoCians and interested readers on some of my experiences & thoughts. And for that, I would like to thank James and Juliana for extending the invitation to be as guest blogger for the week :)

For starters, I don't have a personal blog and I don't think I will ever find the patience or enthusiasm to perpetually update one. So instead, I'm going to liken this experience to a mini series of short articles/stories.

First, a bit on my personal background...

After completing my 'A'-Levels, I never had a doubt on my next choice of study, and that could only be the School of Computing! However, the numerous course choices proved to be a major headache, but eventually I settled on for Computer Engineering and started a wholesome chapter of NUS life in 2003.

I spent the initial years in SoC trying to accustom myself to this new environment (and de-rust the brain after 2.5 years of irregular usage). One of the more interesting activities that took place was a mini competition organized within the CS1101S module to seek creative and interesting fractal designs generated with the scheme programming language. This was my submission and I was fortunate enough to be doing just enough for a prize :)


In retrospect, I could have certainly enjoyed and enriched myself further by participating in more activities especially those outside the scope of regular work. And I sincerely urge anyone who still has that chance to seize every moment of it.

In my 3rd year, as part of the industrial attachment program, I spent some wonderful time with I2R. It was also in the same year that I chanced upon posters plastered over SoC (you might want to spend some time looking at these posters) advertising the National Infocomm Scholarship (NIS) offered by IDA. I made the application, churned the required essays and after some grueling interviews with a panel of interviewers, I received the award and with it, a job with NCS.

The last year in SoC ended with the finale - the Final Year Project, a piece of work where I had the opportunity to work with excellent mentors from DSO. We spent a couple of months even after I left NUS to complete some editing works for the final publishing of a paper that eventually got accepted in the ACM WiSec'08 conference.

As part of the benefits of the NIS, we get to participate in overseas projects of the company. In the traces of a fading memory, yet I recall firmly two of the options presented to me - Australia vs Qatar. I pounced on the Qatar option. It took me a moment before I realised I knew nothing about this country, except that the Middle East region didn't really exhuberate much sense of safety (after a trip there, I can assure that places like Qatar, Oman, Dubai and some others can be even safer than Singapore). So my moment of berserk (and fearlessness) lead me to great experiences with project involvements in Qatar (Hukoomi - a Qatari Government Portal) and Oman and a most interesting encounter with the Middle East.

Allow me to create some suspense here before I start becoming a bore (more importantly I need to catch a wink). I'll share more about the NIS program and a bit more on my experiences working in the Gulf area in the next post :)
Feel free to drop some comments or if you want to know about specific stuff just shoot and I can try to answer them in the subsequent posts. Cheers.

P.S. a photo that I really like...

- dmon