Little Friends

I have another Twisties question: why are cultured milk drinks like Vitagen, Yakult, etc only sold in such small bottles? They are supposed to be healthy and contain live friendly bacteria. Perhaps the bacteria won’t be so friendly when there are too many of them in your stomach, huh?

:P

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NST article: Yakult Lady comes a calling
PS: What do vegetarians have to say about ingesting millions of live bacteria in one gulp?

I Wish

Once as a child I spent an afternoon alone watching a very long movie called Dune. This was the time when I used to spell robot r-o-b-a-t. Though I didn’t really understand English then, I know now that it was an awful movie adaptation of the Frank Herbert book.

“The worm is the spice, the spice is the worm”

It stuck with me just like Livin’ on a Prayer – not an awful song – stuck in my head until I heard it again years later at a mall in Seremban in 1992. I’m glad that I’m reading the book now, after years putting it off because of the thickness of the hardcover volume at the school library. The paperback version doesn’t look as menacing.

There were two movies I wished to be made into blockbuster cinematic releases. One was The Lord of the Rings, which thanks to Peter Jackson is now one (or three) of the best, biggest movies ever made. The other one was Robotech/Macross. Hopefully this will soon become a reality, as The Hollywood Reporter reported in September that Warner Bros. has taken up the rights to produce a Robotech movie with Tobey Maguire.

Is it too much to wish that they would make a trilogy out of it too?

Take My Wing by ukitakumuki at deviantART

Two Movies

I’m hearing a lot of disappointed voices over Beowulf. Many who went to watch the movie really had no idea that it was an adaption of an old epic poem, like the movie Troy starring Brad Pitt was adapted from The Iliad. Apparently, many were really attracted to the movie to see a naked Mrs. Pitt, and went away feeling cheated to find that Beowulf was an animated, rather than live action, movie. LOL. Earlier, a radio station asked listeners to call in and give their best war-cry in return for tickets for the movie, but callers invariably gave a wolf howl instead!

I went for the animated dragon, and was definitely not disappointed
(Paramount Pictures/Yahoo! Movies photo)

The Kingdom was shocking but ultimately forgettable. The first bomb, set off by a suicide bomber dressed in police uniform really caught me by surprise. The MPAA gave The Kingdom an R rating for “Intense Sequences of Graphic Brutal Violence and Language” but really, what are “intense sequences of graphic brutal violence and language” on a cinema screen when we already have 24 on primetime TV? As for the politics and setting, I can imagine the movie being sold in a boxed set along with Syriana.

The “… kill them all” quotes at the end of the movie may well be the most lasting impression of the movie, but ultimately movie is forgettable apart from being an action flick. At this GWOT age, we are already drowning in the violence.

The Point

The point of being a research university is RM50 million of additional funding.

There’s an interesting back-story behind Whats the point? by wirestyle at deviantART.
Click on the image to find out!

Interregnum

in•ter•reg•num (ĭn'tər-rĕg'nəm)
–noun, plural. –nums or –na (–nə).

1. an interval of time between the close of a sovereign's reign and the accession of his or her normal or legitimate successor..
2. any period during which a state has no ruler or only a temporary executive.
3. any period of freedom from the usual authority.
4. any pause or interruption in continuity.

[Latin: inter-, inter- + rēgnum, reign]

How’s that for a big word, unless you are a walking dictionary/thesaurus, in which case I hate you!

I first came across the word through Isaac Asimov in Foundation, referring to a period of anarchy between the fall of the first Galactic Empire and the establishment of the second. I’m eternally thankful to Abang Aziz for introducing me to SFF.

[BTW, I’ve just received Axis and The Clone Alliance from Amazon on Tuesday. The package arrived two weeks early – all hail Amazon! Now I’m seriously considering putting the books I’m currently reading to read these two first]

We are in sort of an interregnum on campus too in between semesters. Today is the deadline for submission of last semester’s results. The new semester begins December 3. It doesn’t mean that we have nothing to do till then, though, as there are administrative meetings, seminars, etc to attend. The week before the semester begins – wait a minute, that’s next week! – will be spent preparing for the new semester.

In the meantime, the university is reminding us (staff without PhD) yet again to go for PhD. OKAY, we get it already!

Honestly, though, I am still not done thinking about the whole PhD thing. It is teaching and learning that I love, not particularly the research part. So much for wishing that I’ll be a student forever – yeah, careful what wish for, kids! I suppose I’d be perfectly happy teaching in a high school. Why can’t we be happy as a teaching university? Why must we all want to be research universities?

SIGH. There are some really big decisions to make. I hate big decisions.

An Exercise of Futility

The government is refusing the industry’s request to allow the selling price of general purpose (wheat) flour to increase from the current RM1.35 per kilogram. The request follows an increase in the price of wheat, imported from Canada and the United States, from US$235 to US$40 per tonne. At the same time, the government reassures the public that the supply of flour will not be affected.

LOL.

Good luck trying to fight market forces. The only way the government can guarantee the supply of flour at the current selling price is by subsidizing the industry. More subsidies, yeah, right.

If I’m not mistaken rice, not bread, is the staple food of Malaysians. Why can’t we simply abandon price control?

Price controls distort the market and incur high costs to enforce, but ultimately when it really matters, they usually don’t work anyway. Politicians should really not make promises they cannot keep.

But that’s really what it is all about, isn’t it?

Computer Down

Not mine.

I dropped by the district police headquarters in Selayang on the way to work this morning to settle my mother’s speeding ticket, but was turned down because “their computer was down”.

I assume that really it was the network that was down instead of the computer. So, there were a few people sitting at the lounge area waiting for the network to be “up” again, whenever that will be, while the visibly embarrassed policewoman manning the counter helplessly kept telling everyone walking in about the network interruption. She could have just put up a notice.

Really, how often do we experience such a thing at banks, post offices, and government agencies? So much for the government’s digitization initiatives and the Multimedia Super Corridor, I suppose, when everywhere they cannot even setup reliable network systems.

Haven’t they heard of redundant backup systems? The tech people I talked to invariably claimed that it wasn’t their fault, but really the bean counters or top management’s decision to not authorize the necessary budget. SIGH. Don’t they realize that in many ways an unreliable system is worse than having no system at all?

How did we, mankind, survive the centuries before electronics? How hard it is to dig out the old registers and receipt booklets and do things manually in the name of honest-to-God customer service? They can always key in the data later. Unfortunately, we are now pretty much slave to the machine instead of the other way round.
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PS: My mother didn’t really go very fast. She was ticketed for going 96kph over a ridiculous 80kph-speed-limit stretch on the MRR2.

Borrowed Time

The notebook’s AC adapter cable, after years of wear, finally broke on Monday so I had to borrow the department notebook. The thing with semi-public property, nobody actually takes care of it, so the PC was such a mess. The desktop was full of files and folders from long-past conferences and presentations and the installed software were never updated. I just couldn’t stand it, so I spent the better half of the day on Monday bringing the PC to a more respectable state.

Anyway, back to my notebook, I had to place an order for a replacement adapter which only arrived today. Thank God there is a replacement adapter, or I would have to buy a new notebook!

So it’s back to marking exam papers now. Unlike most of my colleagues, I don’t bring the scripts home to mark, but do it strictly at the office during office hours. I give two days for one section/class – one day for the multiple choice part and one day for the essay part – and I’m already halfway through, expecting to submit my the last results next Monday.

By the way, I’ve just recently installed Office 2007 on the notebook. I was perfectly happy with Office 2003, which I bought with my own money, but the ‘free’ software provided under the university’s academic licensing deal with Microsoft (the evil empire) is simply too hard to resist. Now, if I could only get my hands on a free Vista-loaded (read new) notebook.

:P

Last Word

I
“What is the Malay word for begging?” asked Pak Suherman this morning while we were invigilating an exam – my last paper for the semester. He was looking at a picture of Buddhist monks begging for alms in the newspaper. It caught me off guard. Begging is mengemis.

“Do you know the origin of the word mengemis?” he continued. I gave up. Mengemis comes from Khamis –Thursday. People give away charities on Friday, the Muslim holiday like Sunday is to Christians, so the poor beg on Thursday, hence meng-Khamis – mengemis.

I swear I heard it before. Pak Suherman leaves for Surabaya tomorrow.

II
It is finally the end of the semester, though I have four miserable piles of exam scripts to mark before the semester is really, truly, over.

Already someone came to see me yesterday. He sat for the exam on Friday – my other paper. This semester is supposed to be his last, he said, and he is looking forward to returning to his home country. He already told me this two days before the final exam.

“So?”

“I forgot to answer one essay question” he said. It was unbelievable. I told the class many times, I told him himself directly a few times more I’m sure of it, and the instructions were clearly written on the question paper – ANSWER ALL THREE QUESTIONS. He only did two.

“Can you help me?” he asked with a phony sad face. The ship has sailed.

“You’ll get the marks you deserve” I said.

Zzz...

My brother crashed on my sofa bed after a movie last night…

… and got his photo posted on this blog.

:-D