Law above love February 7, 2010
Posted by zhiyuan in Politics, Society.2 comments
He was nervous. He had met him for the first time few months earlier in person, and until today, he still got nervous at the very thought of seeing him again. He thought he was early, but he was already there, looking as charismatic as ever, finishing the food on his plate.
“My idol,” he mumbled in his heart, trying to control his heartbeat so that he would not look nervous as he approached the dining table. “Not in front of him, of all people…” he thought. He gave him a charming smile, the very smile that had captured so many ladies’ hearts in the past, “would it work on him too?” he thought.
“Ahh… you are early, come, have a sit,” his voice is as inspiring as he first heard him on TV, making a speech on the need of a open market in the country.
“Can I f*ck you?”
He was stunned. He would not forget what happened next for the rest of his life. The bed, the sweat, the passion – he is in love, or is he?
For the next two days, however, he struggled. “No, this is not right!” he could not sleep. “It’s against the law!” he yelled. “I have to abide to the law,” he decided. He did not bath, he did not go to the toilet. “I need to keep the evidence,” he thought. He did not go to the police first, “I have wasted two days, I need to extract the evidence as soon as possible!” so he went to the hospital. He was so determined, as shown by his never-give-up attitude in finding the right hospital (on his third try) which would extract his “evidence”.
He is the perfect citizen, one who put law above love.
If everyone is behaving like him, there would be no love-related crime in our world. He is unreal.
Nasir Safar – Sound bite reporting February 6, 2010
Posted by Wilz in Politics.4 comments
My summary of the whole Nasir Safar affair:
- Newspaper: “Someone said he said some serious shit! Let’s publicly crucify him!”
- Malaysian Public: “YEAH!!!”
- Me: “Wut?”
Yeah.
- No I’m not trying to defend Nasir Safar.
- Yes what he said taken by itself is heinous.
- Yes what he said even if given a context is still likely unacceptable.
- Yeah resignation is probably the right way to go.
- Regardless of intent, that kind of statement basically ends any public career. Sure.
But my first reaction upon reading the news about what he said was, what was he talking about at the time? “Nobody’s that stupid…” That racist, maybe. That stupid to say those things in public in a derogatory way? I don’t think so. Which makes “slip of tongue” or “stupid, ill-advised joke” pretty likely.
What I really want to know is why he used those two sentences in a talk supposedly promoting racial harmony. None of the articles (or blog entries) I’ve read about the whole deal gives any context at all to what he was saying at the time. Unfortunately this issue is SO sensitive nobody dares to even provide the context in which his alleged racist remarks were presented, in case they are deemed as attempting to defend him.
It just leaves a bad taste in my mouth that so many people are condemning, hating and recommending ISA usage on him, when I can’t find ANY context to what he was saying. Doesn’t ‘intent’ matter at all? One needs to have experience having one’s statements taken out of context to appreciate how $!@# it can be I guess.
Notes (to Myself) On Starting Teaching February 4, 2010
Posted by Wilz in Education, Personal, Teaching.4 comments
I taught my first 3 hours of class as a lecturer this week. Writing this entry as much to myself as to my readers.
I am teaching “Introduction to Computing Statistics”, Foundation (fresh school leaver) level. It is quite a simple subject, and it’s very easy to quickly cover the whole syllabus.
The first thing I found when teaching is that it’s easy to talk, but it’s hard to have students sustain interest/attention. It’s easy to grab their interest momentarily, but it’s hard to figure out if they are understanding what you are saying.
The prevailing question in my mind as I speak in front of the class is – do they get what I am saying? Do they understand why I ask them the questions I ask them? It is in fact frustrating as it is constantly in my mind, and sticking all kinds of doubts in there. I believe it is healthy however, for if I ever lose interest in this question, I would’ve stopped being effective as an educator.
In my very first class, one of the first things I found myself doing (not planned) was to put the textbook on the visualizer (camera – projector thing), turn to the first chapter where the definition of statistics is, read it out loud, and say, “That’s all rubbish to you isn’t it?” In retrospect, I always wanted to do that! Ahahaha!!!
I hope I successfully discussed statistics as it relates to the real world in my first 3 hours. Trying hard to find links for the remaining VERY dry chapters.
I am a boring old behavioral lecturer this week (and possibly this trimester) – no interesting methodologies I believe in employed so far, mainly because I don’t really dare to buck what is considered the norm without first getting my ears wet. A bit disappointed at myself, and reminder to self – don’t forget to start!
Two (I hope) interesting things:
I challenged my students to find me the mathematical proof that will allow me to estimate a student’s attendance accurately (within certain errors) if I were to only sample each student’s attendance a few times rather than take their attendance every lecture. It should be possible with the math I am going to teach them. In retrospect, it seems a bit too easy haha.
I discussed degrees of freedom, unbiased estimators, and advanced statistical proofs with them on an intuitive, non-mathematical level when asking them why they think sample variance calculations divide by (n-1) rather than (n) as in the population variance calculations. Told them my own conclusions and the limitations of my own knowledge on the matter, but encouraged those interested to find out more.
My conclusions? Teaching isn’t all fun, but I enjoy it!
Guaranteed Method of Stopping Stupid-But-Well-Meaning-Friend/Family-Forwarded Spam January 22, 2010
Posted by Wilz in Tech.2 comments
I just picked up an idea to stop forwarded spam… from a piece of spam my aunt just forwarded to me…
Subject: Inti College Xxxxx Needs Help
Hi, my name is Xxxxx. I am 19 years old, and I have testicle cancer. I also have a large penile fracture, from repeated beatings. Doctors say I will die soon if this isn’t fixed, and my family can’t pay the bills.
The Make A Wish Foundation, has agreed to donate 50 cents for every time this message is sent on.
For those of you who send this along, I thank you so much, but for those who don’t send it, what goes around comes around. Have a Heart, please send this.
Please, if you are a kind person, send this on. PLEASE HIT FORWARD BUTTON NOT REPLY BUTTON.
YOUR’S FAITHFULLY,
Xxxxx
xxxxx@hotmail.com
(PLEASE HELP ME LIVE LIKE YOU DO)
He is a real person. Both Facebook and Friendster confirms he’s an Inti College student, and he has many animated ‘GONG XI FA CAI’ testimonials from friends up until recently – you know, the usual Friendster spam.
I was composing an email to him to let him know that whatever prank that was played on him is still being forwarded when it occurred to me that maybe someone did this to him for a reason. And I realized… that… the next time someone forwards some rubbish like this to me… I could… <evil glimmer> just change the names/email address in this email… <stares at shoulder devil> <thinks about registering anonymous email address> <feels a tap on other shoulder, turns head and looks at shoulder angel> Sigh.
ARGH. Not heartless enough.
P/S Yes, my aunt can’t tell that an email from someone needing help who at the same time admits to getting a penile fracture from jacking off too much is probably fake.
PP/S I tried to “anonymize” this to protect poor Mr. Xxxxx but any Googler worth his salt will find the full contents of this email on two idiots’ blogs who posted the full email AND picture while claiming they don’t want to make it worse for the guy. ROFLMAO.
I might have died January 7, 2010
Posted by siewwenglee in Personal.10 comments
I’m starting my blogging here on a fairly gloomy note, but its only when we have a big accident that the urge to write comes again.
If you all don’t already know, I was recently involved in an accident. I was driving back from the Curve when I nodded off at the wheel and promptly steered my car into a divider. The car went into a tailspin after the impact on the right side and ended up in a bush. I remember little else about what happened during the crash. I know when I came to a stop, I was groping about for my glasses. Someone eventually found them, I can’t really remember who. It might have been one of my friends who weren’t very far behind me, headed in the same direction. One of the lenses was gone, and I was half blind for the next 18 hours or so, until my mum and brother brought my my spare pair from Malacca. In that 18 hours, I had to choose between being disorientated by opening both eyes and having only one behind a lens, or going round with one eye closed and looking like an idiot.
My car is very banged up. The front right wheel came off and the driver side door caved in. I suspect the chassis might be damaged as well. The insurance claims are going to be pretty big, probably half the value of the car or more.
I had turned a quarter or my car into scrap metal. I can’t say that I really loved that car. I love it the same way I love my stove. It serves an important purpose in my life. I don’t have an emotional attachment to the thing, which probably makes the sight of seeing it mangled a little easier. But now that I have reverted to using my old Wira, I find that I kinda miss that little thing.
By some miracle, I escaped somewhat unscathed. I took one day off to make a police report and see the doctor, but I was back at work the next day. The major injuries include a 30cm bruise on my stomach that the seatbelt left and whiplash injuries on my back and chest. The doctor gave me a quick once over and proclaimed that all my ligaments are intact and that all I had were soft tissue injuries. I hope she is right.
Anyways, I think I’ll go to the main lessons learnt over this experience.
1. It is impossible to judge if you are too sleepy to drive.
I have driven when I was sleepy before. I got home safe every time. Those times, it was just general tiredness that was the problem. I wasn’t nodding off or anything. Having gone through that, it is easy to conclude that you would know when you are too sleepy to drive. The reality is that reaching that conclusion is impossible when you are sleepy. I knew that I was not fit to drive at some very basic level while I was at the wheel. The problem is, at that point, it was already too late. My brain was incapable of processing anything beyond basic reflexive responses. The critical step of forming the conclusion that I was too sleepy to drive was impossible to reach. If I don’t form the conclusion that I am too tired to drive, I cannot actually pull over. I think its one great danger of driving that no one bothered explaining.
2. If I ever become a soldier, I think I’ll be one of the few atheists in foxholes.
I know its very vogue to suddenly realize just how lucky I am and attribute my luck to the gentle hand of my creator saving my skin. But it didn’t happen. I didn’t have a religious revelation after my highly improbable escape from death and injury. I did not find God, I did not even subconsciously entertain the possibility of divine intervention. And no, I didn’t intentionally suppress any religious thought because it would contradict my pre-existing beliefs. I don’t think I am arrogant enough to refuse to admit that I am wrong about something as important as this. If I had felt some divine cocoon protecting me, I’d be happy to admit it and start going to church or something. But I didn’t. It does worry me a little to think that I might have reached the same point of blind faith in atheism as some fundamentalist theists have in their dogma. I am a little concerned that I had become so hardcore that would become completely dismissive about religion. I hold people with blind faith in contempt, so I really dread the day I join their ranks. But for now, I think I am safe. I think I have enough intelligent friends who will happily point out that I have gone off the deep end of atheism should it ever happen.
All I thought of when I got out of the car was, ‘Dammit this is inconvenient’. And of course, ‘Thank you Hyundai Getz safety design team’.
3. There is no hope for the PDRM.
Yes, this is an admission of guilt as much as it is a rant against the system. And yes, I know what a huge contradiction it is for me to be playing the system on one end while wishing it were different from the other end. But facing potential jail time and really big fines, I succumbed. I am not proud of it, but I would not do any different if I were faced with the same scenario again. I’m not that much of a hero.
4. Some touts are actually looking for an honest living.
I think I got lucky that I decided to trust a bunch of touts that were not out to fleece me. I have to admit I was very relieved to find out that their workshop is a panel workshop for my insurance. Makes things a whole lot easier. They even volunteered to bring me to the doctor after I made the police report. This accident is one of those experiences where I found myself in a situation where the fast talking gangster-looking fellow with brown hair is actually trying to help me more than the smartly dressed officer of the law.
Learn Touch Typing! December 29, 2009
Posted by Wilz in Education, Personal.7 comments
It just occurred to me that for some reason, touch typing is not part of computer skills education. Not even a chapter on it. And yet, typing is such a ubiquitous part of computer usage. I type reasonably fast (I think), a benefit which is enjoyed by far too few people in an age where computers are so heavily integrated in the workplace. I’m going to talk about some of the personal things I’ve enjoyed from fast typing, especially at work.
Start like this!
I can finish the minutes of a meeting by the time the meeting ends – i.e. type as fast as the decisions are being made. (Being very fast at Microsoft Word and using styles helps as well probably.) I send out the meeting minutes ten minutes after the meetings end, and the ten minutes is for fact/attendance checking.
I also write a lot, and a lot of people comment that it seems easy for me to produce a piece of writing quickly. I on the other hand find that writing is hard. I throw away a lot of the text I write as I edit and refine the speech / article / body of text. (Like for this post, I probably deleted as much text as you see posted, and that’s for a blog post.) So being able to type fast helps me put down a lot of ‘trial text’, and the less effort I had to make to put them down, the less reluctant I am to part with (delete) them.
Another important aspect of writing is taking down ideas as they come. The specific content, how they flow, story angles and little useful phrases pop into your brain unpredictably, sometimes when you’re writing something else. Being able to take that down quickly, and paste it somewhere in the rough order of your writing is also important. In short, writing well and quickly on the computer, probably is helped a lot by the ability to type fast.
Of course, other office related work – writing emails, proposals, composing letters, and updating calendars and to-do lists is sped up considerably. It’s also very impressive to be able to sit in a brainstorming session with senior colleagues while drawing, typing out and revising what they’re saying onto slides right in front of their eyes. Heh.
Social activities on the computer is sped up as well. I regularly have to slow myself down when chatting to avoid drowning out the other party chatting with me. Chatting with people in games, posting in forums, updating twitter or Facebook – all of these things are faster the more quickly you type.
Also, if you can type without having to look at the keyboard (called touch typing), you free up part of your mind to just focus on what you are typing. You don’t need to cue your fingers with your eyes, and look back up to double check what you’re typing. You keep your eyes on the screen, think of something you want to have appear, your fingers fly, and tadah, you have text. (It also looks really cool if you look at and talk to someone while you’re finishing off a sentence or two. Ahem.)
Our use of computers just seems so sub-optimal without proper typing instruction. Futuristic input options may make a lot of this somewhat obsolete, but for now, there is no reason not to master typing. I did a search for a typing speed test, and went with the first two results:
On http://www.typeonline.co.uk/typingspeed.php, taking the average from 5 tests, my speed is about 121 words per minute (wpm). The text difficulty can vary wildly, but my typing speed is somewhat constant.
On http://speedtest.10-fast-fingers.com/, I got the following results:
506 points, so you achieved position 378 of 506,056 on the ranking list.
You type 648 characters per minute.
You have 120 correct words and you have 2 wrong words.
Try the tests and post your results in the comments below. :) I also video-ed my fingers typing, “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.” It’s an English sentence that contains all the letters in the alphabet.
I have my parents to thank for my learning typing. I loved ‘messing’ with the typewriter at my mom’s office, and she would always give me a piece of paper to tap tap away on. But when my sister and I begged for a computer at home, they told us that we had to learn to touch type first, or they’re not buying us one. They got us this typing workbook and I would go downstairs to my father’s office, sit in the corner with an old typewriter, and tap away. FFFF JJJJ FFJJ JJFF FJFJ JFJF DDDD KKKK … In hindsight, they probably would’ve bought the computer anyways, but it’s powerful motivation indeed.
I wonder if there’s a ‘too late’ barrier to typing. I learnt it quite early in my life. I also wonder if learning typing on a typewriter will always be superior to learning it on a computer. I remember that typing on the typewriter was hard, especially when trying to hit the keys ‘a’ and ‘Shift’ with your left little finger. Switching from that to a computer is like sprinting after taking off the weights you’ve tied against your ankles for a week.
I’ve enjoyed so many benefits from knowing proper typing techniques. I don’t get why more people have not picked it up. I think I’m going to try to get this into the syllabus for Computer Applications in my university. Mid semester lab test – typing accuracy and speed test in the computer (typewriter?) lab!
Eight persons the world needs to meet June 25, 2009
Posted by Wilz in Entertainment, Society.add a comment
A brilliant performance, not only due to Sarah Jones’ talent with accents, but due to what each character has to say.
Fantasy is not Sci-Fi! June 13, 2009
Posted by Wilz in Entertainment.5 comments
Title on book: “Arthas: The Lich King.” Title on shelf:”Science Fiction.”
Is it really that hard to understand that fantasy stories and science fiction are two different things?
I used to think that some bookstores are just too small to carry too many of either genres and therefore just lump them together on the same shelf. But big bookstores seem to do the same. Yes I’m looking at you BORDERS @ The Gardens MidValley.
Even if you want to lump them together, couldn’t you call it “fantasy & sci-fi”? Argh.
Watermelon Buns June 12, 2009
Posted by Wilz in Personal.1 comment so far
Willie : you can has read email pls now thx k
Sent an email to William, asked him to read it. The purpose of this post is to… introduce watermelon buns to the world.
Willie : you can has read email pls now thx k
William : familiar name
Willie : yes he r
Willie : you may replai email nao kthx
William : can i reply here
Willie : no
Willie : the other two (including the shmuck) must sees
William : haet
Willie : or i can i guess quote you or somethins
Willie : but i’ll put ‘watermelon buns’ next to each line
William : wtf are watermelon buns and how can i get some
Willie : just the sound of em are awesome aint it
Willie : they will only surface once the moon kisses mars where the star (which is not the sun) sheds it’s tears
Willie : and you know that’s not happening for a bit
William : damn them stars
Willie : replai wru?
William : sent you big doodoo
William : ah rats i sent it to you only
Willie : WHATANOOB
Willie : WHAAAAAT AAAAAAAAAA NOOOOOOOOOB
William : i hate yahoomail
Wilz
zhiyuan
William
siewwenglee