Electronics Update

First thing first; I lost my mobile today, so:

1. YAY, finally a real reason to buy a new one!
   
2. [insert favorite swear word here], I have to go out and buy a new mobile!

:P

Last Friday my mouse died. The plastic one, of course, I don’t have pets. It worked fine at the office during the day, but then when I got home and powered up the notebook in the evening, the notebook failed to recognize the mouse. The old Targus piece was as old as the notebook. I knew it wasn’t the notebook’s fault because it recognized the mouse I requisitioned from my brother’s PC. However, after using the small notebook mouse all this while the regular-sized mouse felt uncomfortably huge, so I called up my brother to buy me a new mouse on his way home. He bought me a RM15 mouse that came in an anonymous brown box. The thing looked awesome, but didn’t work even half as good. The cursor was everywhere, and the only way I could get it to work acceptably was by using it on a cardboard as a makeshift mouse pad. You get what you pay for, I guess, so the next day we went out and I got myself a proper Logitech piece for RM60+.

Earlier, about a week before, I also finally bought a new calculator. I had been using the calculator app in Windows as well as Excel for calculations since my old calculator was stolen almost a year ago. It worked fine when I was sitting in front of the PC but when in class teaching, for example, I had to rely on the students to work their calculators and give me the answer to any calculations I couldn’t do in my head. The problem was they didn’t always give the same answers.

Any suggestions on a new mobile? I’m pretty much set on another Sony Ericsson, though.

World vs. West

World Bank by dogmadic at deviantART

Q: What is the difference between the West Bank and the World Bank?
A: The West Bank lends only to people in the West, while the World Bank lends to the whole world.

If it was a joke, it was a really lame joke. It wasn’t, unfortunately; at least not at first.

A colleague likes to spend the first five minutes of his class discussing newspaper headlines, so asked his students the question one day. Most of the students gave the above answer. Since we really don’t have better things to do than gossip and joke about our students, it soon became a favorite joke at the department.

BTW, I had a student who came to see me to drop the colleague’s other class because she found it stressful that “the lecturer expects students to read newspapers and discuss current issues”. I actually imagined myself smacking her in the head with a rolled up newspaper when she said that.
HINT: The class is called Globalization and Regional Economic Powers.

The said colleague is widely regarded as one of the best, most inspiring teachers in the kulliyyah.

I am giving my students their mid-semester test this week. Judging by the impression on their faces during and after the test, it might have been a difficult test, or at least more difficult than they expected. LOL. Hopefully it shook them up real good into preparing a bit harder when it comes to the final exam at the end of the semester.

Since Popeye brought up high school memories, our chemistry teacher, Cikgu Ibrahim used to tell us to bring empty bottles and old newspapers to tests because they would be so difficult that we will piss and shit in our pants.

Maidin: Eh, cikgu pakai stokin merah!
Cikgu Ibrahim: Apa, tak boleh?!

Free Firefly

Serenity by -aa at deviantART

If you caught Joss Whedon’s – he’s the guy who brought us Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel – awesome but short-lived sci-fi western Firefly and its 2005 movie follow-up Serenity, dig and don’t have enough of them (damn FOX!), have too much free time to kill, or simply cannot resist anything free, you can download a new Firefly fanfic novel by Steven Brust called My Own Kind of Freedom.

It’s released under a creative commons license, so you are free to download it and share it with your friends as long as it is not used for commercial purposes.

Go ahead, go nuts. I know you can’t possible resist this!

Fast Track

Earlier this week France unveiled a new super-fast train called AGV (automotrice à grande vitesse) intended to succeed the current TGV. This new train, which has already been ordered to be used in Italy, can travel at up to 360kph. By installing engines underneath each car rather than only underneath locomotives at either end, Alstom makes the train not only faster, but also more energy efficient than the TGV (and no doubt more expensive too!)

Apart from my interest in war machines, I actually have a small thing for trains too, so I thought “Hey, why can’t we have it here?”

A high speed intercity rail service linking the west coast cities Butterworth, Alor Star, Ipoh, Seremban, and Johor Bahru with Kuala Lumpur can stimulate further development in the cities. Even greater benefit can be gained if we extend the service all the way to Singapore. Undoubtedly, the cost will be too high for the government to finance, but that doesn’t mean that we cannot allow private corporations to undertake the project if they want to.

This brings into mind YTL’s proposal to build a high speed train link between Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. Many people objected to it, which I can’t really see one good reason why. Definitely there wouldn’t have been as much opposition if the proposal was to build a high speed train service from Kuala Lumpur or Butterworth to Bangkok.

I was told that in the previous administration, private companies undertaking so-called mega projects were given a government guarantee, basically providing for the government to take over the project in the event the companies went into financial difficulties. Anybody can tell that such guarantees only encourage moral hazard. The present administration has supposedly stopped the practice. So, if a company were to embark on the project as a pure private venture, why not?

I’d really like to see us building an intercity Maglev train service, but that’s really pushing it, so the AGV will do.

:P

__________
UPDATE: I finally managed to watch Arranged yesterday after having finished downloading the movie ages ago and really enjoyed it. It seems I ended up spending the Chinese New Year holiday catching up on previously downloaded movies and television shows, which was taking up a lot of space on the hard drive.

Secrets

My sister told my mother that she has booked to buy a car. My brother was with them at the time, so indirectly my sister told him too. She made mother to promise to keep the information secret for now, as she wanted to surprise my father. “She didn’t tell me to keep it a secret from you,” said mother when she told me about it. My sister didn’t tell me about her buying a car, so I suppose she was planning to surprise me as well, but my mother just couldn’t help telling it away. “Don’t tell her that I told you,” mother warned me.

Can you keep a secret? I’d like to think that I can, though sometimes I’m not entirely sure about it myself. There are secrets, and there are secrets. People keep all kinds of secrets for all kinds of reasons. The moment you tell even one person whom you trust completely of a secret, you may just as well prepare that everyone else will know about it. It may not be that the person whom you told of the secret violated your trust by telling it to someone else, but you may have slipped yourself. If you couldn’t help telling one person, you could have easily told others too, even unknowingly. The walls have ears, they say, or hidden cameras.

When a person tells someone else a secret they rarely tell the whole story, so the recipient may not fully appreciate the actual context, motivation and gravity of the situation. Alternatively, the other person may simply disagree and have a different idea.

Like, when I thought rather than pretending to be surprised later when my sister unveils her new car, which may be some weeks in the future, it would be more interesting to see her reaction to finding out that her secret was out now.

“When are you getting your car?”

It was priceless.

The point is, if you have a secret you want to remain a secret, keep it to yourself.

The Car

Another song.

Daddy’s Gonna Pay for Your Crashed Car
by U2, from Zooropa (1993)

You’re a precious stone
You’re out on your own
You know everyone in the world
But you feel alone
Daddy won’t let you weep
Daddy won’t let you ache
Daddy gives you as much as you can take

Aha, sha-la
Aha, sha-la
Daddy's gonna pay for your crashed car

A little uptight
You’re a baby’s fist
Butterfly kisses up an’ down your wrist
When you see Daddy comin'
You’re lickin’ your lips
Nails bitten down to the quick

You’ve got a head full of traffic
You’re a siren’s song
You cry for Mama
And Daddy’s right along
He gives you the keys to a flamin’ car
Daddy's with you wherever you are

Daddy’s a comfort
Daddy’s your best friend
Daddy’ll hold your hand right up to the end

Aha, sha-la
Aha, sha-la
Daddy’s gonna pay for your crashed car
Daddy’s gonna pay for your crashed car

Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday
Thursday, Friday, Saturday’s alright

No, I did not crash my car, and my father will definitely not pay for it if I did. I’m just taking the car for its second scheduled service tomorrow.

Underlining the fact that I am not a car person, I just realized recently that there is no door open warning light in my car. One chore I really hate the most is washing the car, so I either get my brother to wash it for me or take it to a car wash. On the way back after having the car washed last weekend I noticed the exterior noise particularly loud. So I flipped the power windows, but the windows were all fully wound up, and there were no lit warning light on the dashboard. But then when I activated the central locking system when I stopped at a restaurant the alarm went off. Apparently both the left front and rear doors weren’t properly shut.

“Didn’t you see a warning light?” asked my brother. I didn’t. In fact I actually didn’t think much about it at all until I told him about the episode. “The warning light must have been broken, then,” he said. “I’m not sure that there even is a warning light,” I started to think. So, we looked, at the dashboard, and then in the car manual, and found that there was indeed no door open warning light on the car. How odd. But at least I won’t embarrass myself tomorrow complaining about a broken non-existent warning light!