Sunday, June 25, 2006

NUSIIAC - Day 1

NUSIIAC – Day 1

Okay. 9 Brave souls namely Dylan, Aaron, Ongnardo, Si Rui, Mingwei, Daniel, Hwee Juin, Christopher and Kang Rui + our beloved J2s Ming Jie, Jia Hao, Heidi and Kim participated in the manly NUS Invitational Indoor Archery Championship. Bearing in mind that this is a very competitive competition, we had some manly sessions in both the indoor and outdoor ranges. Preparations were of course without hiccups along the way. We forgot to take bows from the store and the day before we found the store locked beyond any hope of redemption. Plan A to wait for someone to come failed. Plan B to break in failed and finally we had to resort to Plan C which is to take the key and open it the next morning haiz….
-edit by aaron-
I met sirui at the range uber early in the morning with the KEY (thanks ongnardo for giving me the wrong address) and we had berakfast then cabbed down to nus. the wonderful cabbie who reminds me of mr ngan couldnt find the place so we alighted at some random bus stop and were given a lift by a passing group of FAAC archers in a van (thanks random archers!)
-/edit-
Well, the morning came and it was the very first competition for much of us since those who participates now are more of the ones who did not participate in the Punggol Angsana Shoot. Me, Chris and Kangrui paid $14.60 to the imba expensive cab from Hougang and easily found the place owing to our great navigational skills. The hall is rather large and the shooting boards are at the two sides of the hall (Please refer to the pictures). Our Koach Ken is already there with our ex-captain Kimberly and all the TP archers. Usual stuff… set up bow… Collect money which amounts to a grand total of 250bux for 10ppl. Soon after we went to do warm-up with the TP archers, they got a lot and form an outer orbital while we form the inner quantum shell (mug too much). The champ then came at around 8 15 after we all thought that he will wake up late. Ng Li-Ting Annalyn now suddenly appears out of nowhere and gave us a bag full of Hao Liao( Good stuff) for supplies. Thanks a lot Annalyn!! After that she left as suddenly as she came. At this point everyone starts to feel the heat( actually it was damn cold because of the air-con, hands are clammy, legs feel jittery etc.) Haiz, rather typical since most of us here are those who did not take part in the Punggol shoot because of a wide variety of reasons. Nevertheless we still feel quite man and yeah, JUST DO IT!!

At this point, our two great supporters have arrived – Daryl Chia and Wee Jian Ting Natalie. Hmm at least we HAVE supporters during the competition, a real privilege.

Erm, for the benefit of those who do not know: Format – 3 arrows / end 10 ends / round 2 rounds. Distance = 18m, target face = 40cm, same for all classes. Classes are 1) Standard and 2) Open. Since we are n00b n dun have the long thing yet, we of course took part in Standard.

Team captains ‘ meeting, Hwee Juin became the de facto captain and we were informed of some nitty gritty details like whistle, judge call ($100 WAD THE MAN) etc. Yeah and now for the sighting end. Somehow they decide to be stingy and only gave us one end of 3 arrows for sighting. It’s the first few arrows of the day… haven’t feel pumped up yet and so yea, the arrows were all over the place, and looking at my competitors they were rather man, especially the one who shoot the same target paper as me, quite man.

“The first end is gonna start in 5mins time… 3mins time… 1min time… FIRST DETAIL, PLEASE STEP TO THE SHOOTING LINE. Okay the competition started. There were quite a lot of people in standard class, 93 MeN and 46 woMeN and there were 24 boards each with 4 target papers. Hence there was all the way up to the3rd detail. Not bad also, a lot of time to rest and calm down in between. Finally the 3rd detail came and yeah I stepped forward to shoot the very first arrow in a REAL COMPETITION. At this point there was a sudden realization that I am actually in a blurdy competition and each and every arrow will fly and can never come back, just lyk the ancient Chinese saying. This sudden enlightenment did not do any good. First arrow – blue (quite off), 2nd – another blue (shid…) 3rd – black (nooooooo…14points total). This is definitely not the best start of any competition, cannot continue the rest like this…

Fortunately for me, I walked around, relaxed, happily met an old RI scout which somewhat inspired me and continied my 2nd end which was much better (at least more than). It was a good thing that I progressed steadily throughout the first round and managed to maintain a relatively stable score. Most of them are in the low 20s since there is always a nasty blue somehow in my shots. Haiz…

Meanwhile, while walking around, it seems that Chris is doing quite fine in the first round, hitting the yellow consistently and slowly and Aaron with his usual Stafe™ that allows him to shoot with amazing speed, finishing first every end ( in terms of timing nt score). Daniel meanwhile plays along with his Angel™ tab, at the same time working on the form. On the other side, Mingwei and Hwee Juin seems to be doing fine as they complain of a “yellow drought”. Dylan, Si Rui and KangRui like me seems to have early jitters but all went along fine after that.

End of the first round, everyone reports their scores. Okay, we seem to be averaging 150-200 which was definitely lower than our usual practice scores, rather disappointing. Best round goes to Aaron with 230/300. Haiz, better improve in the next round, after eating a muesli bar and some of the other random stuff in the goody bag, sponsored by M1.

Round 2 starts and we all feel pumped up, trying our best to improve our dismal score. For myself I still feel quite MaN at the start, hitting the usual low 20s but things started to change and started hitting quite good scores peaking with a 28 but it seems to have hit a maximum point, dy/dx=0, d^2y/dx^2 < 0. Shid, more and more screwups start to happen. Somehow the arrows start to evade the yellow. I neatly hit all 3 arrows on blue on below but on closer inspection, all linecut 7 ( heng, but was rather lucky, quite screw up as all is all over the paper). Forunately, the curve soon hit a minimum point and the last few ends were relatively good.

Chris meanwhile has improved quite a bit over the previous round and as usual, he competes in terms of endurance with another guy from NJ who holds for as long as he does. At last he has finally found his match. Aaron’s fast shooting methods seem to detoriate as the 2nd round was definitely not his best, with a very big drop in score ( attributed to a MaNly sight). Daniel, under the watchful eye of Kenneth and the Angel™’s blessing has improved his form and scored much better. As for MingJie… no comment… he’s in nirvana.

On the other side, Hwee Juin with her coolio Samick Masters ( hmm she was the only Samick Masters to join NUS Indoor) scored quite ok, a little better than the first round but Mingwei feels the heat of the competition too much and was not in her best form in this round. Dylan however performed much better, scoring 20++ each end, rather impressive. Kang Rui wasn’t relly at his best that day and was feeling quite disappointed (Relax man). Si Rui however, did better in the 2nd round and has a more consistent score.

And so the competition has ended. Taking score… I had a nice chat while plucking out arrows with my board-mate, an NP archer, talked so much kok tt the Judge scolded us lolz. Hmm it seems that we have met quite a lot of new people in this competition and it was quite an experience. Quickly, we went to the shooting area which is now empty to pack up our bows. It was quite fast and MingJie opened the bag of sweets I an explosive fashion and we had a good laugh lolz. Took some group photos and finally we set off for lunch as our J2s who are participating in the Open event came.

Lunch as usual is rather indecisive, pizza-man will be lost in the great maze of NUS so we desided to go to the famous NUS cheese prata shop. We had quite a nice lunch with all the cheesy prata and Milo™ Dinosaur. Toking kok about all sorts of stuff, from Karl Sew to Compund Bows. Spent a rather lot of time there.

We then went back to watch our dear seniors. The standard class results are already out. Wow, what happened to all the suspense, drumrolls and everything??? Err I got 12th with 449, Hwee Juin got 11th with ?420? Aaron 16th with 420. Chris ?20th? with 410. Sorry I’m not too sure about the exact figures. Please look at http://www.nusarchery.org/results.htm for more details.

Well, none of us made it to the top ten which is dominated by NUS and NTU and some people from Polytechnics and funny archery clubs. Hmm, nevertheless it was a good competition when we can really see our standards among others in Singapore.

After that we merely slacked around, watching our Coach Mr. Ang, Kim, Heidi and Jia Hao shoot. Please refer to the pictures to find out what we did during this time, all the funny stuff like spotting Mr. KS, talking crap etc, essentially having fun! Our seniors did relatively well in the end, with Kim getting 4th for women’s open class. Congrats! Our koach was in 14th position in Men’s Open Class.

In the end, the team results are announced with one of our team barely making it to the team event. The team comprises of Chris, Aaron, KangRui and MING JIE. After this we all went home and so please read the next entry to finds out more about the team event!!

Saturday, June 24, 2006

NUSIIAC-day2

so began the day of team events.
mrt-bus to nus. setup. then stone till the rest of the pple came. anyway. team rjc-1 was to compete in the team knockoput today. and who were we shooting against in the first round? the top team (ntu). oh joy. so. registration. then captain's breifing. then shoot. then get eliminated in the quarter finals. right. then watch open and compound!
we concluded that bensen and henry could cheat suring the team event. lol either of them could shoot twice. but whatever. compound team event was most interesting. we observed someone who's draw is more exotic than mr ks'. (video later) then there was the pro man shooting x-10s with his compound while everyone else was using uber fat arrows. then! it was time for standard class team finals! maris stella (on fire! they were the 7th team to get in to the 8 team knockout) vs. our dearest ntu which kicked us out in the first round. ahem. quarter finals. surprise, surprise.. ntu won. but only by a little bit (apparently).
then what? watch open team event! PPCC owned all haha for first and second placing we had PPCC vs PPCC wow. and of course mr + was present to watch ppcc vs ppc. ppcc won. surprise. (and my camera ran out of batt)
and so the shooting ended. lunch time! (or so we thought)
pack up, take down bows.. visit the toilet and come back for the long awaited expected buffet lunch to be greeted by.......nothing~! wow. fantastic. now what.
stone lor. think of creative things to do. try to take a rjc team photo of 3 very sian people then admire a certain blue riser... sleep.. stone.. try to study... have AS (antisocialdevice) party... watch the other archers do random things.. sirui and I went to look for sdomething to eat (breakfast) and we ended up eating pratially frozen pau from cheers. (wow! char siew ice cream in bread!) ingjie tried to get anyone and everyone to play chapteh to the horror of the organizers.. ("please refrain from playing in the hall")so in the end we were sitting with random notes in front of us while listening to asd(s).
then lunch came. FINALLY. guess waht it was. not buffet no. not fired rice. not duck rice. it was....drumroll..... da bao fan! woww (you mean we waited so !@#$%^&* long for THAT?) ok but anyway. it wasnt that bad. (but it wasnt that good either) but whatever.
so lunch was over. waht can i say about lunch? it was most unexpected. but anyway. after lunch was the prize presentation. okay so the prizes were presented. then what?
go home lor. and thats what we did.
and thus, NUSIIAC 2006 was brought to a close.


The RJ NUS Indoor Team would like to thank the following:
Our Principal, Mr. Hodge, (its a formality)
Our coach ken, for all the time, form-correction and ManLy training sessions, encouragement etc.
Mr. Chong and Mr. Wong, for being our tutor mentors
NUS Archery for organizing the above competition
Natalie and Daryl, for being our supporters ;)
Annalyn for the Good Stuff
Our Captain, K Aswin Kenneth, for being a MaN and the inspiration
RJ Archery J1s for the support and encouragement
RJ Archery J2s for the guidance
SamickSports, HoytUSA, Cartel DooSung, Easton, InterNature and Sam Wha Archery for the wonderful equipment.
the faac archers in a van
And all those who have helped us in one way or another

on second thoughts (ps): ongnardo your post is like 3x this so whatever. anyway the competition was one heck of an experience so thanks to everyone who took part, came to support, organized the thing and whatever once again (no mr hodge this time). thank goodness it was 2rounds X 10ends X 3 arrows cause I only had 4 straight arrows lol. finally thanks nus for the collarpin (even though i wanted a shirt but nvm)

Friday, June 23, 2006

You wanna have Karl Sew, you shall have Karl Sew.
Enjoy!!

this started out as a tag

but it got a little too long haha

first, thankyoo ongnardo for uploading all daryl's photos! (: your captions are hilarious!

and jinglin, clearly you haven't heard about our uh 'encounters' with -ahemyouknowwho-. you can ask kim or me to fill you in on the juicy details the next time heh. or actually, you could ask our resident gossip king daniel too. i think he knows =P

anyways, i should really go study now.
all the very best to everyone for cts!! just a little less than a week more to freedom!
(okay not really, but it's a breather for a few days at least)

Thursday, June 22, 2006

Pictures from NUS Indoor

Hi everyone,

Pictures from NUS Indoor can be found here

Have fun viewing!!!

Monday, June 19, 2006

bored...

some things i found out during nusiiac...

aaron needs to shave more often.

mach 3 turbo is a good shaver (because ongnardo uses it O.o)

ongnardo is friggin' rich - his bedroom is 1/6 the size of the nus sports hall, according to si rui. wth? (note: at this point in time you do not start raising your eyebrows and start wondering how si rui knows the size of ongnardo's bedroom in indonesia)

daryl can eat tons of prata. lots and lots and lots of it.

annalyn has become our official food provider!

natalie is super free. but it was nice having you around :)

jiahao's shooting does not depend on the presence of his parents, however much he thinks so. ;)

mingjie needs to appear less interested in discussing topics to do with *ahem* -censored-.

karl sew does shoot out of the yellow. :O

<3 kim

(apologies for some of the lines you might not understand)

Has this place died? Hmm.

Wow so quiet suddenly. I thought the blog was going to be spammed with loads of Archery Camp and NTU competition thingies.

This blog can't die... It mustn't... (=

Saturday, June 10, 2006

Peeporhhh.

People, we have a slight problem.

lame jokes xD

hello i was bored. therefore hence because --

Q; Which is the favourite fast food restaurant of archers?
A; McDonalds - because it's the Golden Arche(r)s

Q; Which is the favourite holiday of archers?
A; Christmas (X'mas)

Q; Why are gifted archers considered freaks of nature?
A; Because they're the X-men.

Q; What should you name your son if you want him to be become a great archer?
A; Not Robin, not Legolas, but Christopher! (X-topher)

Q; Why do archers sometimes do badly in tests?
A; They would rather see an X than a 10.
[hopefully this won't happen in CTs!]

Archers like to say "Shoot!" because they want to get straight to the point.

okayyy... hope you guys enjoyed it and have more to add on.
if not, you can always click on the x in the corner!

<3 nat

Friday, June 09, 2006

Quote of the day

"you have nothing to do ah? wait I poke you with arrow"
-Mr +

Thursday, June 08, 2006

BlackJack!

At the indoor range, Ongnardo, Daniel and I were invited to play a game of blackjack by some random compound archer. (in preparation for the opening of the IR?) at first we were like... what? Mr tang will own us for playing cards here! but as we were about to find out, this ws no ordinary game of blackjack
the game works like this:
try to acheive a score of 21 on the target, any number of arrows allowed
anything beyond 21 is considered bust
x represents ace, and can be counted as 1 or 11 points
missing the target paper is considered as bust
handicap for compound bow: the whole yellow ring is considered as 9 points (no x or 10)
LOL.
actually its quite fun
we should try sometime. at 30m/80cm wheee

Wise Words From Mr. +

By some random chance, we had this enlightening conversation with Mr. + . We shall now take this opportunity to share this with everyone.

Mr. + : In Punggol there how come you all lost to NJ liddat ah?

Aaron: They sent their J2s wad.

Mr. +: You sure or not? Their J2s is carry metal bow one u noe. I know some of their J2s

Aaron: Yah they use metal bow.

Mr. +: Oh issit? But you all how can lose one? I havent really see your scores yet. Maybe the rounds are better at the end or better at the start i dont know. Without stamina ah, its no use, you may shoot lyk 10 marks at the start but towards the end ah, cannot make it liao. Do you know, in archery one of the most important thing is stamina. When you are in a competition, skills matter only around 20%. Yes. Only 20%. MENTAL is 40% and PHYSICAL is 40%. You know, in Korea, they select their archers by looking at the feet. It is very imporant as the feet is like foundation, they say, as solid as a rock! Nowadays archers dun bother to go and run anymore. They dont know that stamina is very very very important. At serangoon there you need to run ah, at least 8 rounds up and down. Your coach confirm got make you run before but nowdays the archers like so bochap like that. Like dam buay song, sianjipua. How can like that? And when you train that time also you need to take note. If not ah, you dont know whether you improve or not. You can get a 20c "555" book from the bookshop opposite, then you take your score every time you shoot. If not ah, you can go to the 4D shop and take a stack of TOTO betting slips and tick off your score every end. I know of this archer who does that and see, he dunnid to waste money!

Aaron: Erm, the standard class rules have been changed right?

Mr. +: Yah, its changed recently. You know ah, we all need to adapt to change. If you see carefully ah, there is actually a `loophole'. The FITA book says "no carbon limbs" in standard class but nowadays there is "foam limbs". Technically ah, it is not carbon limbs one.You can say that its not carbon limbs wad. Rules have to be changed now lah. Like now got hackers last time dont have. You know ah, last week got some 16-year-old go and hack to Sweden's government website. Now the whole country cannot function at all. All the traffic ah, finance ah all haywire. You dun even need to be in the same country to hack. Can hack from other country also. The one who hacked sweden is from Germany. Last time also got another kid go and hack the CIA. Then CIA go and find him. They find him then ask him to work as hacker for them. The world nowadays ah. China always go and employ hackers to go and hack Taiwan. Then Taiwan also get hackers to go and hack China. (laughs). Nowadays you all young people like nothing better to do like that. You all got play that game called Counterstrike or not?

Ongnardo, Sirui, Aaron: Err yah...

Mr. +: I know of one archer ah, specialize in playing computer games one. He go and play and play and develop the character until very powerful then go and sell for real money ah. He say he usually sell for arounf a few hundred dollars then got people want to buy also. All these people ah, ciak pah bo kang tao. You all better dont play too much ah. I know of some archers the whole night play counterstrike and heroes III (Heroes V was released a month ago, fyi) until 4am then the next day come like half-dead like that. How to train? Even work also cannot do properly.

(forgot the time) Aaron: Oh ya , we need the receipt for the fletches

Mr. +: Okay come wif me...



LOL!