Agony

cr: tumblr

My hall (and the whole campus') internet has been really bad for the past 1 or 2 weeks. For those of you who have my twitter or google buzz, you might notice that I've been complaining about that for several times. It has been hard to download anything, the browsing, download and upload speed is not as fast as before, and the worse is sometimes the internet is down. So at times, I can't browse anything. Well, for me internet is not merely for entertainment and only-for-fun stuffs. It'd been hard for me to read papers (yes, JOURNAL PAPERS or EXAM PAPERS not the word "paper" students and teachers use in Indo which I think, has different meaning), google something out, read wikipedia for basic stuffs, etc.

One thing that disturbs me is the worse download speed for YouTube. It's no secret that while I was still in Indo, the internet speed was much worse than what I have here in Singapore/NTU. Now I can listen to a lot of good songs, be them from the original artists or its cover versions (esp those whose originals are creepy =p), uploaded at YouTube. And they are completely legal, because recording labels upload songs there as well, for promotion or outreach. So there should not be any copyright infringement. It keeps me updated with new songs or songs that I've never heard of and were recommended to me by my friends as well. Some of my friends also record their performances and upload them in YouTube, too. Creativity matters and appreciation required. So IMO, there's no reason to ban or block access to this.

Lately YouTube (or NTU internet..) has been acting strange. Sometimes the videos can't load at all. Sometimes they load only a part of it and then, can't continue or become buffering. Sometimes the bar shows that the video has been completely buffered, but in fact not all parts can be played. So I can't listen to a lot of various songs while I am studying (yea, exam is near) or doing my reports or doing any other things (browsing, blogging, editing photos, etc).

It is not really bad, since I have my phone and my mp3 player, but the songs inside them are limited (both of them don't have big memories, once again because there's YouTube so I just put in songs that I really like) and sometimes after 4-5 cycles of the same set of songs in a day, I'll get bored.

One alternative is to shuffle series and films to keep me company but I will have the tendency to watch them instead. So, a big no. There's Glee which has a lot of songs but still, it is series that has story and watch-able (and its new episode will be out next week!! How am I supposed to watch it without decent internet speed?)

I know exam period is near and maybe the school wants the students to concentrate on studying and achieve good academic results so the university reputation will be improved (well, this is Asia and reputation are based on quantitative achievements and how do you compare to others.. meritocracy!). But does the school expect us only to sit down and cram for exams with our notes and textbooks without company or relaxation? Some brains, at least mine, don't function like that, else we might turn insane. Music and sound make our life normal and may increase our productivity and creativity.. So, if you don't want to produce robots, please return our internet connection!