Christmas

Christmas Plans @ xkcd

I don’t observe Christmas too but school is closed tomorrow for some holiday so I’m assuming that’s it.

GST

I really don’t understand opposition to the Goods and Services Tax (GST) apart from concern over problems associated with adjusting to the new tax.

GST is a tax on spending, like the existing sales and service taxes it will replace. A lot of the complaints seem to mistakenly suggest that GST will be imposed on top of the existing taxes. While the service and sales taxes are between 5 and 10 percent, GST when introduced will be at only 4 percent.

Then, there is argument that while the tax is introduced at a low 4 percent, it will only increase in the future as what happens in other countries. The problem with this argument is that the government can increase the rate of any tax, including the current sales and service taxes. The government has also stated that companies earning RM500,000 or less in revenue will be exempt from GST, as will many essential goods.

If it is not clear yet, I am all for GST. “The devil is in the details,” they say, but all else equal GST is a superior tax than what we presently have.

So I am quite amused today when I read that as part of its Common Policy Framework, the Pakatan Rakyat wants to “[i]mplement a progressive taxation system and reject Goods and Services Tax.” Wait, do they mean progressive taxation and GST mutually exclusive?

Quite simply with a progressive tax, the higher your income the higher your tax rate. Many people believe that a fair tax system should be progressive. I am not entirely convinced myself. A flat-rate sales tax – GST is a sales tax – is the classic example of a regressive tax, the opposite of a progressive tax. Lower income people pay a higher percentage of a regressive tax out of their income than people of higher income.

But GST is not necessarily regressive. If essential goods that make the bulk of spending of lower income people are exempt from GST – which the government already says will be – and say luxury goods are charged a higher rate, GST can be made progressive.

Most importantly, GST provides the government a broader, more efficient tax. Whoever will be in office five, ten years from now will definitely benefit from it.

In the meantime, complaints over corruption and wasteful mismanagement aside, like it or not Malaysians must face the fact of higher taxes soon as our petroleum reserves dry up.

Heavenly Promises

When I read that the PM at Copenhagen pledges to reduce our carbon emissions by 40 percent of 2005 level by 2020, I thought “WOW, this is huge!” It is a very ambitious target especially given the fact that we are currently subsidising the use of fossil fuel like petrol and diesel instead of taxing it. Fulfilling the pledge will require some serious political will, which sadly seems lacking lately in the country. In fact, political will for just about any serious issue seems to be a very rare commodity in any country at the moment. Politicians everywhere are playing it safe. There is no leadership.

In the absence of political leadership, industry shapes our policies.

Then, I read further that the pledge is conditional upon technological and financial assistance from the developed world. Ah, I should have known that there’s a catch. There’s always a catch.

Climate change is a very scary issue to read and ponder about but we don’t talk much about it at all. Even on campus, I don’t see any programs organized either by the university or the students about climate change.

Climate is Changing by h4nd at deviantART

__________
LINK: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)

Week 2

I am beginning the think that there is something conspiring against me going online. Streamyx at home continues to be erratic, while at work Google sites like Gmail and Google Reader take forever to load. The only way I can get Gmail to load is in basic HTML view. Google Reader simply refuses to load completely.

We are now in the second week of the semester so the class lists have basically settled, although I still had a student asking to join my class on Monday and one suddenly showing up today. Registration was supposed to be over last week, but apparently the university only charges a RM5 per day fee for late registration. No wonder many students think nothing about coming and registering late. Even today, a saw a small group swarming the kulliyyah office with manual registration forms.

A colleague recently proposed that we drop one topic from the ECON1610 syllabus to spend more time discussing issues in class, but I disagreed because the content of the course is simple enough as it is. Instead, we can always cut down on instructions and assign reading to the students. We are doing GDP this week. I’ve covered all the definitions and calculation bits on Monday, so will discuss issues today.

Economists haven’t gotten many things right lately, and we don’t even agree on what we’ve gotten wrong. Paul Krugman argues that we have underestimated the flaws and frictions of the market. I would go further. We have overestimated the size and significance of the very thing we call “the market.”

Nancy Folbre; What We’ve Learned: Our (Increasingly) Non-Market Economy

If we have poor measures, what we strive to do (say, increase GDP) may actually contribute to a worsening of living standards. We may also be confronted with false choices, seeing trade-offs between output and environmental protection that don't exist. By contrast, a better measure of economic performance might show that steps taken to improve the environment are good for the economy.

Joseph E Stiglitz; Rethink GDP fetish

Last Week

Last week I couldn’t connect to the internet at home, again. Yes, Streamyx sucks but what real choice is there? I couldn’t be bothered to call the helpline as the last time it didn’t help at all. Has Streamyx implemented a bandwidth cap? Anathem was (is) still there under the bed, but I picked up Makers from the shelf above instead.

Makers is about Perry and Lester who make stuff out of junk, and reporter-turned-blogger Suzanne Church who chronicles their lives. Lester makes mechanical computers for fun, and with Perry they make wonders. You can download and read all of it for free here.

Many reviewers say that Makers is Cory Doctorow’s best work yet and I totally agree, although I’ve only read Little Brother previously. Little Brother was more fun, but Makers has a lot more depth. A reviewer on Amazon even calls Makers a business book.

I took Makers to Kuantan last weekend where the kulliyyah had our IEEP. Earlier, I had registered to take the bus but in the end decided to drive on my own instead. It’s the KL-Karak highway. I love the highland drive with the frequent gear-shifting and tight corners going uphill and downhill. It was wet most of the way too on Friday so I got to put on my hoodie and had a nice cool drive. What a way to unwind. The hills were much more exciting at night, though.

2009.2 (Exams, Part 3)

The new semester began yesterday. However, I cancelled my M&B classes this morning to attend a talk by Prof Jomo KS on climate change and development.

Before I forget, summary of last semester’s batch:

Number of students: 85
Highest score: 77.40% (A−)
Lowest score: 31.08% (F)
Average score: 51.77% (C)
Median score: 51.34% (C)
Standard deviation: 9.31%
Number of students failing the course: 36
Number of students failing the final examination paper: 61

The university records system automatically round the results to the nearest integer, so the final number of fails is 22. All the numbers above exclude two students who were barred from the final exam.

One student scored zero. He turned up at 1020 when the exam started at 0900, saying that he overslept. We turned him away, of course, as per examination rules.

The very next day a student emailed me about a resit exam. She was sure of failing the course (and in fact she did). The email annoyed me to bits, as I have not even started marking, and it means extra work preparing the resit paper. Students often fail on resit anyway, and I don’t think this one will be any different. We discussed abolishing resit exams at the kulliyyah meeting before, but nothing concrete has come from it.

A few days later another student ambushed me at the corridor. He was concerned about his performance in the exam. I told him that there is nothing that he could do now and I was still marking the paper. “Of course,” he said, “only you can help me.” Yes, I got the not-so-subtle message.

He was wrong.

Zoom

Deadline for results submission is approaching and I still have piles of scripts to mark. AARGH! (No, I am not panicking yet.) Ah well, whatever. Let’s post some screen caps. Here’s how the blog looks on my PC now (on Chrome):

Go ahead and click for full size. However, I usually prefer it zoomed out like this:

Which means I want a larger display, which means, well, nothing.

All right kids, class dismissed. You can go back to doing whatever it was you were doing.

Astro Boy

I saw Astro Boy last night. I had been looking forward to it since I first heard about the project. At the same time, I didn’t feel like watching 2012 for it being a disaster movie (really, how much different can one disaster movie be from the next), two-and-a-half hours too long, and the science simply ridiculous.

It doesn’t seem to have done very well at the box office, but Astro Boy was fun. What not to like about a show with robots? Of course, nothing survives the migration to Hollywood intact, so it is not a hundred percent faithful to the Japanese original. The jokes were funny and the visuals were cool. It would have been awesome(r) if they had made it in 3D.

I particularly liked the reference to the Three Laws of Robotics. The Robotic Revolutionary Front was cute too.

Viva la Robotolution!

__________
CREDIT: All pictures by Imagi Crystal Limited/Summit Entertainment

Warranty

When I sent my Linksys modem router for warranty three weeks ago, I really didn’t expect much to come out of it. Then, yesterday afternoon, I received a text message from the computer shop to come and collect it.

Dear customer, your warranty item is ready for collection.

I thought, what exactly do they mean: is the modem repaired, or just returned with a sticky note saying “not covered by warranty”?

Of course, the only way to find out was to go and collect the stupid thing. To my surprise, they gave me a fresh new set.

WOW!

Small Book

I couldn’t connect to Streamyx at all at home yesterday evening, for the second night in a row since Sunday. A call to the TM Helpline didn’t help. They said that there was nothing wrong on their end. I was 90 percent sure that there was nothing wrong on my end either; everything seemed to be working just find. In the end, they gave me a report number and said a technician will come within two days. Two days, in this day and age, is an eternity!

Frustrated, I looked at Anathem on the floor by the bed. I’m just not there yet with the book, so reached inside my backpack for The Clone Betrayal. I started reading and only stopped when I finished the book, and it was already 5 a.m.

The title says it all. The Unified Authority (UA) betrays the clones one last time, this time by blaming them for the debacle on New Copenhagen (and the campaign against the Avatari in general). So the clones, which make up the enlisted ranks of the UA military, are rounded up and sent to a final mission to liberate an Avatari-held planet on the other side of the galaxy. Then, a newly raised all natural-born UA military force is sent to finish the clones up. Of course, the clones fight back.

Like the previous titles in the series, The Clone Betrayal is fast paced and full of action from start to finish, which was why I simply couldn’t put it down. I really enjoyed it, and look forward to the next instalment.

I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, but I came home from work today to find my internet connection working perfectly – YAY! – but really, what happened?

Big Book, Small Book

I have just started reading Anathem, a scary five centimetres thick, 900-plus pages hard science fiction novel by Neal Stephenson. A review says that it takes 200 pages just to get the hang of it, so let’s just say that I pray that I’ll be patient enough to get there.

On the other hand, I am very excited (and relieved) that my latest Amazon order arrived today.

Amazon order #24 placed: October 24
Package shipped: October 27
Estimated delivery date: December 10
Package received: November 16

Amazon 24 contains Makers by Cory Doctorow and The Clone Betrayal by Steven L Kent. Guess which book I’ll read first (and postpone Anathem yet again)?

Of course, everyone can download and read Makers for free, but I buy it nevertheless because I think it’s worth paying for. It’s like taking a car for a test drive or downloading songs from the internet. If I like it I’ll pay for it. While you’re there, don’t forget to read what Cory Doctorow has to say.

The Clone Betrayal is the fifth book in Steven L Kent’s Clone series, a light military science fiction paperback the kind you can finish in a day. It’s the exact opposite kind of book to Anathem.

And, oh, there’s that marking thing I have to do too...

Exams, Part 2

Extracted from the Examination Guidelines for Invigilators

Part V: Instruction to Examiners
24. (a) The respective examiners of every paper must be present within the first 30 minutes of the examination to answer any queries related to the question paper or to correct any errors in the question paper. However, the examiner of any paper shall not in any manner to assist candidates in answering their papers, such as explaining a word or translating a question.

Examiners are usually also invigilators. So, while invigilating we aren’t supposed to help explain to a student even what a single word means. Fine, I suppose, if a student asks to define a critical term. What about, however, if a student asks to explain a word of trivial importance to the question? After all, the objective of the exam was not to test a student’s English vocabulary.

My second and last paper for the semester was this morning – with about 180 scripts to mark, AARGH! Here are the actual top two questions I received this semester. The first, from last week:

Other things being constant, what will be the effect of each of the following upon the equilibrium level of GDP?
(iii) A rapid upsurge in the rate of technological advance.

“Sir, what is upsurge?”

The second from today:

How did they financial crisis which originated in the US become a full-blown global financial crisis?

“Sir, what is the meaning of this word (full-blown)?”

So, two questions went through my mind each time:

1. Should I answer them (when the rules say no but the words don’t really matter)?
2. Should I answer them (when the words are common expressions everybody should know)?

Exams, Part 1

Extracted from the Examination Guidelines for Invigilators:

Part VI: Disciplinary Action for Breach of Rules and Regulations by Candidates
25. (b) Any breach of examination instructions, rules and regulations or parts thereof is a serious disciplinary offence, and candidates found guilty of such an offence shall be subject to an immediate disciplinary penalty as provided under Part V of the Disciplinary of Students Rules 1984.

Part VIII: Rules and Regulations for Candidates
27. (c) Candidates are not allowed to take into the examination hall/room, handphones, calculators, electronic diaries, purses and wallets, reference books (unless specified), booklets, diagrams or pieces of paper or any written material.

Part IX: Instruction to Candidates
37. Writing pads, booklets, pieces of paper, pictures, purses, handbags, handphones or any article on which writing is possible cannot be taken into the examination hall except stationery that is permitted by the Chief Invigilator. While in examination hall/room, candidates must not receive books, papers, booklets or pictures of any kind from anyone, but may receive these items from Invigilators authorised to do so by the Chief Invigilator.

Heard in the corridors this week, that a student was caught during one of the exams cheating using a smartphone containing pages and pages of notes.

“How could the student have slipped in the phone to the examination hall?”
“Apparently, now they are allowed to bring in their phones.”
“WTF?!”
“There were complaints in the previous semesters that some students lost the phones they left outside, so now we’re told to allow them to bring them in.”
“They already knew that phones weren’t allowed in the exam hall; it’s in the rules. So if they left their phones outside and they went missing, it’s not our problem. They shouldn’t have brought them in the first place.”
“Err...”

Mr. Policeman

I
People are now again talking about alleged shoot-to-kill policy of the police. Of course, the police are denying it.

In this country, citizens are generally not allowed to carry firearms, so carrying firearm illegally is only asking for trouble. Then using the firearm against trained police officers is plain stupid, and as proven often enough, deadly. So who goes around carrying guns and shooting at the police? They must be either idiots or hardened criminals. Of course, the two usually aren’t mutually exclusive.

Police officers are issued handguns and are trained to use them. Unlike what we see in movies, however, the level of training received by the typical police officer does not give him or her the ability to target and shoot specific parts of the body. Both the handgun and the training that goes along with it are meant primarily for deterrence and self-defence against, well, people who go around carrying illegal firearms and shooting at other people. When shot at, the training kicks in and the police officer, facing a mortal threat both to his or her own safety and that of the innocent public, shoots back.

Sure, people have rights, criminals too. However, when a person opens fire at officers of the law, endangering the public, he ceases to be part of the public that requires protection. He is, at that point, a threat the must dealt with swiftly and surely. We certainly do not want to have innocent bystanders die because the police failed to act swiftly and surely enough.

Perhaps our police officers do need better training, but we must never vilify them for doing their job.

II
I saw Malaya’s Secret Police 1945-60: The Role of the Special Branch in the Malayan Emergency by Leon Comber at the bookstore and picked it up immediately. Both the Emergency and the police Special Branch are two of my favorite reading subjects. The Special Branch, the country’s premier internal security intelligence organization, was also during the fight against Communism the best in Asia.

Leon Comber, a former Special Branch officer, gives an excellent account of the birth and development of the agency, which benefited from the professional training and guidance from such renowned British law enforcement and intelligence agencies as the UK Metropolitan Police/Scotland Yard and MI5/MI6.

928829

Recently, deviantART offered free shipping for print orders – to every address in the world. It was a big deal. People offer free shipping all the time, but to local addresses only. This was global. So I bought one, which involved quite a bit of drama in the process to get the payment cleared. Apparently, Citibank blocked me from making international online transactions by default when they issued me a new card, and I forgot from before that deviantART has a problem accepting payment using Malaysian credit cards, so I had to use PayPal.

Anyway, order #928829 was shipped on October 30 and arrived on Tuesday, November 10. Next, sending it to frame.

Original: Time to Fly by Risachantag at deviantART

Wonders

My internet connection the last few days has been erratic. I wonder if it has to do with the weather, as the disconnections most often happen in bad weather; the new modem, or with Streamyx itself either local or system-wide.

My phone has been acting up too. I hope that it’s not going to die anytime soon because I’m really not in the mood to shop for a new phone. Looking for a new phone is much more complicated than buying a new PC, and I much rather buy a new Windows 7 PC.

On a positive note, I recently pow-ed my brother a new mouse when he dragged me to the computer store. What’s so exciting about a mouse, you say? Well, it’s a 2.4GHz Microsoft Wireless Mobile Mouse 4000 with BlueTrack technology, which allows me to control the, er, pointer, while lying on my bed several meters away from the PC. SWEET! Yes, it helps that I have these bionic eyes to see where the pointer is on the tiny 15.4-inch notebook computer screen.

Paper Cut

It is paper cut season again. My first paper (of two) was on Wednesday so I’m right now marking exam scripts, but I’ve got my fingers cut even before that from going through term papers for another course. Those damned bleached white sheets with razor-sharp edges are a nightmare! Thankfully, there’s no blood, yet, unless perhaps I squeeze really hard. I had a paper cut so deep once that it actually did blood, so I left a partial finger print everywhere I touched.

Wherever am I going with this?

[SAVED, CONTINUED]

All right, I’ve finished marking the paper, so how about some basic statistics:

Number of students: 31
Highest score: 76.11% (A−)
Lowest score: 24.37% (F)
Average score: 53.62% (C)
Median score: 56.88% (C+)
Standard deviation: 12.48%
Number of students failing the course: 10

The semester is now over, but how I wish I could give the students their grades personally. See, I told you to take the course seriously and study from the beginning of the semester instead of just a week before the final exam. See, I told you to ask if you don’t understand the material, the language, whatever, instead of just sitting there quietly like everything is all right. See, I told you to work on improving your English. See, I told you...

Oh, I forgot one more:

Number of students failing the final examination paper: 23

OUCH!

Rocket Ship

Just a very nice picture that kind of reminds me of the movie Gattaca.

NASA’s Ares I-X rocket lifts off from launch pad 39-B at the Kennedy Space Center October 28, 2009 in Cape Canaveral, Florida. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images via The Big Picture)

The launch was part of NASA’s Constellation program, which among other things will develop a replacement for the space shuttles to send astronauts into orbit and all the way (back) to the moon and possibly even Mars. Cool.

If only there is a bigger picture; it will make an awesome wallpaper.

Zombies

Zombies are huge now, bigger than vampires after that Twilight movie, so when Amazon suggested me World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks, I thought I’d give it a try. I’m happy that I did. Being a book with zombies, World War Z is generally classified as horror, but reading it didn’t feel like reading a horror novel. It felt more like science fiction (movie) Resident Evil or I Am Legend than Dawn of the Dead. It’s not that much of a big deal, of course, since both horror and science fiction are usually lumped together under the big speculative fiction tag.

Unlike the typical novels that follow the exploits of single protagonist, World War Z is presented as a collection of interviews of survivors of the Zombie War, also referred to as World War Z, which almost wiped out the human civilization. The zombies were victims of an infection, a zombie pandemic that turned people into the undead. The main focus of the book, however, is not the zombies or the outbreak but how individuals, communities, and governments reacted to the horror as well as the aftermath. In many of the situations, the zombies can easily be substituted with some other biological or natural disaster.

A suburban community reacted to the panic by killing their children, while a frail Japanese otaku took three days to get off his apartment building before fleeing to the mountains and became a warrior monk. Some people went to act like zombies and attacked other people (and still got eaten alive by real zombies). Israel saw what was coming and turned itself into a massive fortress in self-quarantine and Japan was evacuated. Iran and Pakistan exchanged nuclear warheads. All the while, astronauts on the International Space Station watched helplessly as the events unfolded. It was a war, because the zombie hordes were killing humans and turning them into more zombies and wouldn’t stop until they were stopped. It was a war for the survival of the species.

While the number of casualities in the hands (and mouth) of the zombies were horrific, the greater horror was when governments realized that the only way to save what was left of the population was to sacrifice some of them. As military forces all over the world were over-run, trying to save everybody risked losing all. Turning the war around took some cold calculations.

Blah blah blah...

All in all it was a very wonderful read; very highly recommended.

Graffiti on the Death Star

I never get the joke or motive behind the penis graffiti, but it seems to be quite universal; I’ve seen it everywhere.

This one is just funny. If you are offended somehow, look away.

Source: Geekstir via Gearfuse.

Fried, Part 2

I came home from work the other day to find my internet connection down.
[WTF?!]
I usually disable the computer’s wireless devices when I take it out of the house i.e. work, so I checked; they were on, the WiFi indicator was lit.
[Somebody must have switched off the modem.]
I went out to see none of the device’s indicator lights blinking or lit.
Closer, I saw that the wall socket was switched on.
[Uh-oh!]

Later, at the computer store...
“The adapter is broken-lah, boss.”
“All right, what about the modem?” I could just buy a replacement adapter, something, to power the device.
“The modem looks fine.”
[PHEWW!]
“Wait. See, the ADSL indicator won’t light up.”
“So?”
“So it must be broken too, or about to, so better send it for warranty repair, lah.”
“Is it covered by the warranty?” I thought I’d just buy a new one and be done with it.
“There was heavy rain today, right, with a lot of lightning? We’ll just send-lah, you just might get lucky.”
“How long will it take?”
“Three weeks, at least; they will call you.”
“Three weeks! What will I do in the meantime?”
“Don’t you have a spare? This happened to me too many times already. Nowadays you always have to keep a spare one around.”
“Don’t you sell this model [Linksys WAG54G2] anymore? I don’t see any.”
“No, lah. The manufacturer is revising this particular model, so there are no more new supplies coming. You can still find them downstairs at [redacted], though. They have a lot of the old stock left because they’ve been selling it at a higher price, RM60 more than us.”
“Can you recommend me something else, then?”
[Quiet]
“What’s the best brand/model (for a wireless modem router) I can find?”
“This one, lah.” Laughing.
“Whatever, lah. I’ll buy any of the other ones.”
“Sorry, boss, we’re closing already.”

So yesterday I drove around Sungai Buloh after work looking for a half-decent computer store, and got myself a D-Link DSL-2640T. The price is a little high, but I was not in the mood to drive to Damansara/PJ/KL to find a cheaper price, and definitely did not want to spend half the weekend disconnected.

And here I am, YAY!

Fried

Plenty to write about, but my wireless modem router is fried. :P

By the way, last night’s Michael Jackson’s This Is It was awesome! Make sure you watch it in Dolby Digital for that extra umph.

All Along the Watchtower

So I’m YouTube hopping like I have nothing else to do.

U2 introduced me to the song. I know it’s a Dylan original but I like the Hendrix version best.

No reason to get excited, the thief, he kindly spoke
There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke
But you and I, we’ve been through that, and this is not our fate
So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late

Surrender

I’ve added a link to BFM 89.9 “The Business Station”, my favorite – practically only – radio station for the past year. Not only does it have great news coverage, great interviews, but perhaps most importantly great classic song selection.

And the announcers don’t seem to like the sound of their own voices too much.

And here’s Surrender by Cheap Trick just for the heck of it:

Spam

Call me old fashioned, or just old, which seems to be a growingly common theme these days, but emails from students often make me cringe.

An uncle wrote me letter once when I was in school that made me want to cry (but I didn’t by the way). The letter wasn’t particularly sad or sentimental; though totally unexpected. It was just a mundane letter saying hi. What moved me was the language and style, beginning with “Ke hadapan anakanda...” Nobody writes that way anymore. Nobody wrote that way anymore. It was beautiful.

sir, regards to the total Carry mark dat u post tru online in myiium, dat mark is for what? cuz, u total it 60%..

Forget about the finer art of letter-writing. Business and formal correspondences from banks and government offices now are littered with glaring grammatical errors. Now, it seems, people can’t even write proper emails.

so, how about my mid term? sit for it or not?

In a letter, regardless of the form, each and every word properly written and spelled carries meaning, the whole composition of embodies the message both apparent and implied, all reflecting the writer. I wonder if the students writing these emails realize that they actually sound (or read) rather rude. Perhaps they do, and mean them so in the way people nowadays seem to confuse rudeness with assertiveness. Needless to say, such emails won’t get a reply from me.

__________
PS: I realize that I am beginning to sound like a broken record about the whole thing. Whatever.

Julian

Ever wondered how life would be like post-Oil? I do quite a bit, especially every time I see a new service station being built, like the one being built right now near my house. Will we adjust our lives gracefully, or descend to total chaos overnight? That’s what drew me into buying and reading Julian Comstock: A History of 22^nd-Century America by Hugo-winner Robert Charles Wilson, published by my favorite publisher Tor Books.

America in the late 22^nd century is a feudal society with a fratricidal (among other things) hereditary President and an all-powerful church. The Dominion aims at establishing a ‘perfect’ Christian (read Dominion) Kingdom on all of earth in order to one day commune directly with Heaven. I particularly like the part about the origin of the indentured class, i.e. slaves:

“Refugees from the Fall of the Cities traded the only goods they possessed – their hands, their hearts, and their votes – for food and shelter in a difficult time.
...
The commitment doesn’t vanish simply because a man has had the bad luck to die. If a man’s possessions pass by right to his survivors, so do his obligations.”

Doesn’t take much to go back to slavery, does it?

Cory Doctorow did a nice, short review of Julian Comstock at Boing Boing.

First

I’m not working today as I am on sick leave. As far as I can recall this is my very first MC since I started working.

I missed work for health reasons before due to the occasional cold, fever etc. but never with an MC. I have more leave days than I ever had use for so usually would just call in sick and fill up the emergency leave form the next day. I rarely ever go to see the doctor just with a common cold or fever; it’s just a waste of time and money.

This time it’s different. I had diarrhea all day yesterday, and sometime last night I woke up shivering so bad I actually thought that I was going to die. The doctor told me that it was a reaction to the body losing so much minerals. Oh yes, of course, I totally knew that.

PFFFT!

WTF

Scarface by ~Deathness72 at deviantART

Class presentation for term paper begins this coming Monday, and dude came to see me today asking for suggestions for a topic!

It really warmed my heart. Really, I’m choked.

September Ends

EEEK! It’s already the end of September!

Slow month in many ways, this one. I’m not even halfway through Julian Comstock. Just like Axis and Spin previously, Robert Charles Wilson needs quite a bit warming up to. Meanwhile, there is also Common Wealth, which should be around here somewhere and, oh, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus.

No good movies at the cinema too, which I haven’t decided whether a good or a bad thing, or that it doesn’t matter. The last few days I have been having trouble sleeping so feel totally like a zombie at work and now my body is starting to ache. Mentioning zombie, I haven’t read World War Z too, and Anathem! AAARGH! Meanwhile, Amazon keeps sending me recommendations.

Comics

I am too lazy to actually write anything original, so here are two awesome comic strips:

Expect by kris wilson at deviantART


Creepy @ xkcd

Be cool!

Friday Thoughts

I
Our front gate is always open. There is a man who usually parks his van on our compound every Friday when he goes to the mosque. Even when there are other vehicles, he always somehow manages to squeeze in and park on the grass. We don’t know his name, but he wears a beard and robe and turban. Others who park their vehicles on our compound always acknowledge us with a salam, a smile, or even a nod, but never that man.

II
The prayer at the end of the official state sermon asks to “return our younger generation to the path of righteousness”. I don’t know if I still count as young, but it is not helpful to remind the younger generation every week that the rest of society (or at least the religious authorities) have fixed upon them a particular label. Old people stray too, just read the newspapers, so why only target young people? History, and all the mess we live with today, point to mistakes of the older generation. Perhaps we should pray for the sins of the older generation as well.

III
The sermon yesterday was delivered by someone I went to school with, though a few years senior. He is not an official imam – his father is – but Mak said that it wasn’t his first time, and I think that it’s really cool. Why should only older people be mosque officials and lead prayers? I delivered the Friday sermon once in college myself and it wasn’t a big deal at all.

Selamat Hari Raya!

The contractor finally left on Friday. He will return after Raya to install my brother’s shower screen and rewire/replace the fuse box, at least. That left us with just one and a half days (!) to clean the house up and make it presentable for Raya.
“Will we get the house ready in time?” asked Mak.
“Of course” I said. There really was no other way around it. We just had to get it done by any means necessary. It took us all the way to Raya morning – we finally stopped at about 5.30 a.m. – but we did it. PHEWW!

So lesson definitely learned: never to have house renovation close to a major festival, unless you don’t intend to celebrate it or plan to be somewhere else.

Another important lesson relearned is the amount of junk we accumulated over the years. Mostly they were various plastic containers that came as free gifts, old souvenirs, and other miscellaneous broken and old stuff never used or not used for a long time and unlikely to be used in the future. God knows why we kept them in the first place.

Semester Break

Semester break officially begins on Monday September 14, but since at the kulliyyah we don’t have regular classes on Friday, today is effectively the last day of this half of the semester.

I am having a mid-semester test at the moment. Thankfully, it is a presentation lab, so I have this computer in front of me. Otherwise, I’d be staring at the wall for one hour and a half. There is this student right in front of me whose mobile phone buzzed a few times already. Every time she’ll look at me with an embarrassed look and mouth an apology. Why can’t she just switch the phone off? I just can’t be bothered to ask her out loud. I usually leave my mobile phone at the office when I come to class myself.

Supervising a test can be a little fun, just a little. I can see the faces of the students as they go through the questions. Students do not realize that from the front of the class, or in the case presentation lab, I can see everything and everyone. Of course, everyone is busy concentrating on the test now, but during normal classes I can see them whisper and giggle with one another, text on the phone, scribble aimlessly at the margin of the textbook, steal a snack, etc. At the moment, a female student is tapping her head perhaps trying to memorize something, while a male student on my far left sits back looking like he’s about to cry.

I have never seen a student actually cry during a test before, but I think I’d like to, just once.

By the way, this new blogger post editor does need some getting used to.

Wired Update

There were a few times last week when my notebook got very, very slow. I was afraid that it was due to a virus infection. Since I’ve been using seminar rooms this semester the antivirus program has been screaming out alerts for viruses, Trojan horses, or worms it detects every time I plug in the flash drive after a class. Seminar room computers are full of nasty malicious software. Thankfully, repeated full scans of the notebook showed no infection – or at least none that trusty ol’ McAfee was able to detect. The CPU were running at 100 percent. The good news is that it’s gone now; the notebook is back to its usual zippy state and the problem hasn’t returned for days. The bad news, however, is that I haven’t been able to figure out the exact cause(s) of the problem, so it may well reoccur.

Then, I found that I could not add any more files onto my staff webhosting account. A quick check of the university’s ICT guidelines and procedures confirmed my suspicion – I’ve maxed out on my 30MB allocated storage. No doubt it’s all those colourful presentation files. But then, 30MB nowadays is so small when we have flash drives with many times more space. A call to the ITD helpline to ask for a bigger space got me transferred to a line that rang and rang and was never picked up. I gave up, and now migrating my files onto Google Docs instead.

Loving the look

This weekend, I consolidated all my email accounts so I can access them all through Gmail. Last week, we couldn’t access the university email system even over the local network. Funny, right? It did the chocolate cookie trick – there one minute, not there the next. They said that the network was under a DDOS attack. Whatever.

__________
UPDATE: Today, up to noon September 8, I cannot even open my staff website, at work!

Ramadan 1430

This year’s Ramadan is different here at our home in that we are going through it – so far, at least – without a kitchen. The renovation work is still on-going, so much for the contractor’s earlier promise that everything will be done by Ramadan. In fairness, however, the work being done has gone significantly beyond the simple bathroom renovation we started with, and everything is almost done now.

We rarely went to the Ramadan bazaar in the previous years. Breaking fast, iftar, was little different from our usual daily dinner. “We should eat less during the fasting month, not more,” my father used to say. Father would insist on breaking fast with dates, but otherwise mother would cook the usual dishes, and for drinks we would have hot tea. There were times when I wished that we’d have more, well, “special” food on the table like “everyone else” but by the time we finished eating I’d realize that had there were more food we wouldn’t be able to finish them all anyway. Besides, it’s hard to go for tarawih when you are so full.

This time around, however, we’ve been having takeout food from the Ramadan bazaar and various fast-food joints on a daily basis. I don’t think that I have missed hot home-cooked food more. Even when I was in Boston, I cooked my own food almost every day.

Heresies

Now the battle for the soul of the planet Safehold has begun.

The Kingdom of Charis and the Kingdom of Chisholm have joined together, pledged to stand against the tyranny of a corrupt Church. The youthful Queen Sharleyan of Chisholm has wed King Cayleb of Charis, forging a single dynasty, a single empire, dedicated to the defense of human freedom. Crowned Empress of that empire, Sharleyan has found in Cayleb’s arms the love she never dared hope for in a ‘marriage of state.’ In Cayleb’s cause, his defiance of the ruthless Group of Four who govern mother Church, she has found the task to which she can commit her mind and her courage. It is a cause for which she was born.

Yet there are things Sharleyan still does not know. Secrets Cayleb has not been permitted to share, even with her. Secrets like the true story of humanity on Safehold. Like the intricate web of lies, deception, and fabricated ‘religion’ which have chained humanity for almost a thousand years. Like the existence of the genocidal alien Gbaba, waiting to complete mankind's destruction should humans ever attract their attention once more. Like the existence of a young woman, Nimue Alban, nine hundred years dead, whose heart, mind, and memories live on within the android body of the warrior-monk she knows as Merlin.

And so Empress Sharleyan faces the great challenge of her life unaware of all that task truly entails... or of how the secrets the man who loves her cannot share may threaten all they have achieved between them... and her own life.

I’m so glad to have finished By Heresies Distressed before August ends, though barely. The Safehold series definitely has the potential for becoming a very long, epic series, which I think is simply awesome. I am definitely looking forward to reading the next (and next, and next...) book.

Voices

Joseph Mallozzi offers anime Voices of a Distant Star as an example of intelligent science fiction. I remember feeling cheated – and more than a little annoyed – when I bought the DVD online a few years ago to find the movie only 25 minutes long. But then I watched it, and saw that it was really a beautiful movie. Seriously, there were tears.

Voices tells the story of a girl, Mikako, who is a member of an interstellar military expedition. Left behind on Earth is her boyfriend, Noboru, with whom she tries to keep in touch via text messaging using her mobile phone. As the expedition travels further away from Earth, the time it takes for her messages to get to Noboru increases.

The movie is on YouTube if you haven’t seen it (and want to).

Tech Support

As the department’s honorary support technician, I think this is just awesome!

Tech Support Cheat Sheet @ xkcd

(Click for full size)

D9

(or When I Took My Mother to the Movie)

I bought tickets for District 9 as usual on Tuesday before my brother told me that he was going to Penang for work. Everybody else already had plans, so came Thursday evening I went to the cinema with my mother.

“Cerita apa kita nak tengok ni?”
“Cerita alien”
“Malulah, nanti mak seorang saja orang tua tengok wayang tu”
“Alah, mesti ada orang lain lagi tua, kalau tak pun orang bukannya kisah”
“Kau tak malu orang nampak dah besar-besar jalan dengan mak?”
“Apa nak malu pulak jalan dengan mak sendiri”

District 9 is a refugee camp housing more than a million extra-terrestrial aliens that arrived at Johannesburg, of all places, some twenty years ago. Management of the camp, including the aliens’ welfare, was contracted out to a corporation called Multinational United (MNU). However, as a major defence contractor MNU is more interested in getting its hands on the aliens’ superior weapons technology, which is apparently useless in human hands.

District 9 was the most exciting science fiction movie I have seen since quite a while, and by far the smartest movie this season. The special effects by Weta were top-notch but not excessive so did not distract from the story. I would have liked to know more about how and why the aliens came. Though the movie was about apartheid, it seemed unbelievable that “we” knew so little about the aliens and their culture after all the years of coexistence and interaction. There were no stereotypes. Instead, the “prawns” were totally written off as pests.

Set in South Africa, it was also interesting to see iconic South American military hardware like the Oryx transport helicopter, Casspir personnel carrier, and CR-21 and NTW-20 assault and sniper rifles featured in the movie instead of the tired, generic American equipment we see far too often. The CR-21 in white stocks looked like toy guns, however. Why would anybody buy or make guns in white?

My mother enjoyed the movie too and didn’t sleep at all throughout the movie. She always sleeps during movies.

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CREDIT: All pictures from TriStar Pictures/Yahoo! Movies

Spent

(or Why I Haven’t Been Replying My Non-Work Emails)

Ah, only five weeks into the semester and it already feels like an eternity!

The semester turns out to be my toughest yet, largely due to the new course I am teaching. Although I took Money and Banking as a student, in my second year of undergraduate a decade ago, teaching it for the first time means I have to do quite some preparatory reading myself. However, we are on an accelerated schedule to complete the course by the semester break within a month from now instead of the end of the semester proper at the end of October. So I am constantly chasing the clock, barely catching a breath from teaching one topic to preparing for the next.

Making matters, well, more interesting, I’ve been assigned seminar rooms for my Principles of Macroeconomics classes as well. Seminar rooms are designed around the LCD projector and screen. All this while I’ve been teaching with just the board and marker pen, occasionally using the overhead projector, but now for every topic I have to spend additional time – time I do not have – preparing a PowerPoint presentation.

What all this means is that since the beginning of the semester five weeks ago I have been doing work at home during the evenings and weekends it’s exhausting. I practically haven’t read anything other than textbooks and instructor’s manuals since!

It doesn’t help too that the house is being renovated. While my parents have been planning the renovation for quite some time, the timing just cannot be worse. Half of the house is currently out of commission, including my bedroom, while the rest is in varying degrees covered in cement dust. I have either the living room or my sister’s bedroom to do work in, but when my parents watch the television I have no other choice but the retreat to the bedroom working sitting cross legged on the bed. And now my back is beginning to hurt. The contractor promised that I will get my bedroom-cum-home office back by Ramadan, which is in less than a week. I only hope that he keeps his promise.

I gave my Money and Banking class their mid-semester test more than a week ago but only got to start marking it last Friday. I thought I’d able to be finished with the marking this weekend but now it is simply not happening.

PFFT!

Please Mr. Postman

These are the CDs I have in my car:

1. Aerosmith – O, Yeah! Ultimate Aerosmith Hits
   
2. Bon Jovi – Keep the Faith
   
3. The Carpenters – Yesterday Once More: Greatest Hits 1969-1983
   
4. Coldplay – X&Y
   
5. Earth, Wind & Fire – The Ultimate Collection
   
6. Jon Bon Jovi – Destination Anywhere
   
7. Linkin Park – Minutes to Midnight
   
8. Natasha Bedingfield – NB
   
9. No Doubt – The Singles 1992-2003
   
10. Velvet Revolver – Libertad

They are all original, of course. I don’t listen to them much, however. At the moment, the one sitting inside the CD player is the Carpenters compilation; the second CD, I think, the one with Please Mr. Postman on it.

I don’t usually turn the radio on when driving to work in the morning because I find it distracting. I also prefer not having the radio on when there are others in the car too, because then there’ll be talking, and I don’t like the distraction of trying to listen to the conversation and the radio at the same time. So the radio/CD player only gets turned on when I’m driving home from work. Even then, half the time I’ll be plugged onto the Walkman phone instead.

So, what do they tell about me?

Double Parking

AARGH, headache!

Why do people double park?

1. There may not be enough parking spaces in the area. We’ll get back to this later.
   
   
2. They’re simply being selfish arrogant asses so in fashion nowadays. We can speculate ad nauseum on their deficient childhood nurturing etc and still get us nowhere so let’s skip it. No need to state the obvious, anyway.
   
   
3. They double park because they know they can get away with it. “Everybody else is doing it.,” they say. Nobody is going to give them a ticket or tow their car away. Even if they get a ticket they can simply ignore it and accumulate piles of traffic tickets with no worries at all. Nobody is going after them. “Just wait,” they say, “by year end there’ll be a sale, and we can settle all the tickets at huge discounts!”

So perhaps the real question is why not double park?

Damn us.

If traffic rules are rigorously enforced people won’t be able to get away with it. While they learn, local authorities can make a lot of money collecting fines. Ignore the complaints about insufficient parking spaces. Like roads, there just will never be enough parking spaces.

In the long run, however, local authorities can use accumulated fines to fund construction of more parking lots. At the same time, potential property buyers and tenants will demand more parking spaces. Existing areas with insufficient parking will be abandoned, so the owners will be forced to redevelop. So in the end there will be enough parking spaces everywhere and nobody will have a reason to double park anymore. Better yet, we’ll all drive less and take trains and buses instead.

And we’ll all live happily ever after.

Sheep

Sheeple @ xkcd

Finally, some free time at the end of the week and I have nothing to say. I had so many ideas, interesting ideas, to write last weekend and during the week but they’re all gone now. PFFT! And last night my Streamyx connection was down.

The first week of any semester has one major source of annoyance – students chasing after manual registration. Many of them are already well above the minimum workload while others are struggling to meet the minimum twelve credit hours. As usual, I put a notice outside my office that I am not entertaining requests for manual registration. Of course, it didn’t work. It never worked.

In the interest of students who for various reasons could not register enough courses before the semester begins, I’d suggest that the university limits pre-registration to only the twelve credit hours minimum workload. Then, registration during the first two days of the adjustment period at the beginning of the semester is restricted only to those students before it is opened to everybody from the third day onwards. This way perhaps we can do away completely with the manual registration exercise.

On another matter, I wonder why a student’s identity card/passport number, date of birth and nationality should be on the (partial) transcript when her full name and unique matriculation number should provide more than enough information to establish her identity.

Amazon 23

New books are coming soon, WOOHOO!

• By Heresies Distressed by David Weber
• Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America by Robert Charles Wilson
• World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks

By Heresies Distressed is book 3 of David Weber’s Safehold series following Off Armageddon Reef in 2007 and By Schism Rent Asunder in 2008 about a human colony established in a faraway future as a secret refuge from a genocidal alien race. I took a gamble with Off Armageddon Reef two years ago and it paid off handsomely. The technologically superior Gbaba exterminates any species that could present them a threat, and humanity just happens to fit the bill. At Safehold, the human survivors are supposed to rebuild the civilization and prepare for the eventual showdown with the Gbaba. However, leaders of the mission – well, the majority of them, anyway – thinks that the best way to protect humanity’s survival is to keep the civilization forever in the Medieval age through a religion that suppresses technology and innovation.

Julian Comstock will be my third by Robert Charles Wilson book after Spin (Hugo Best Novel for 2006) and its sequel Axis. It is a speculative fiction about the US in the 22^nd century with 19^th century-level technology. Here’s a review by Cory Doctorow in Boing Boing.

World War Z is a relatively old 2006 book. As the title suggests, it’s about a war with zombies. I’ve never actually read a book about zombies before but it seems to be a growingly popular subject nowadays so I’m really excited about it.

New

A little late, but how can I not post this?

I use Google Reader to keep track of my favorite websites. It’s far more convenient than visiting them one by one. Always, one of the hardest parts of coming back from a holiday is to catch up. There were more than three hundred new items when I logged in on Monday morning. Naturally, I just skimmed through most of them.

New Semester 1 2009/2010 begins Monday. For the first time, I’m not teaching Intro to Econs. I’m teaching Money and Banking instead. Into to Econs is passed over to a part-timer. I think he’s an engineering PhD student. An engineering grad student is teaching economics to human sciences and Islamic revealed knowledge undergrads. Interesting. Good luck to him and to the students. For the first time too, I applied for a seminar room to use PowerPoint for the new course, and end up getting all my classes assigned to seminar rooms. Cool.

I enjoyed taking Money and Banking as an undergraduate partly because we had an excellent professor. I hope that my students will feel the same.

afk.

I’m off to Langkawi for a departmental retreat. See you all next week!

Height @ xkcd

(Click for full size)

^ I would love to have the poster in my office.

The Breakfast Club

One of my all time favorite movies is The Breakfast Club from 1985. I saw it one afternoon a long time ago. Everybody else in school went to religious school in the afternoon but my parents decided that it wouldn’t do much good. So my afternoons were spent watching the matinee show on TV instead.

Dear Mr. Vernon, we accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it was we did wrong. But we think you’re crazy to make us write an essay telling you who we think we are. You see us as you want to see us – in the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions. But what we found out is that each one of us is a brain...
... and an athlete...
... and a basket case...
... a princess...
... and a criminal.
Does that answer your question? Sincerely yours, the Breakfast Club.

Really cool song too by Simple Minds.

CD

A colleague asked if I could help burn a data folder into a CD. “Sure,” I said. The folder contained materials for a workshop the department is organizing, and the organizing committee thought that it would be good idea to give each participant a CD. When I went to the computer, I saw that the folder was just about 6MB-large. Since a typical CD can nominally store between 650MB and 700MB of data, I thought that it would be a huge waste to burn a CD to only use less than one percent of the storage capacity.

Instead, I suggested simply providing the materials on every computer during the workshop. Participants could then either save the materials onto their own USB flash drive or email them to themselves. This way we could save a lot of CDs. Everybody nowadays walks around with a USB flash drive with at least 1GB of storage anyway. With ever bigger and cheaper hard disk drives and USB flash drives, broadband Internet connection and web-based email services like Gmail offering free online storage in the Gigabytes, CDs are fast going the way of the 2.5-inch floppy.

However, the committee insisted. They wanted to give the fee-paying workshop participants something concrete to take home with, other than a folder full of course materials. So I burned the CD.

During our conference last April, a few participants actually went around room to room collecting hard copies of the presented papers even though they were already given to everyone in a CD. There were more than sixty papers presented at the conference. I doubt that they read all those papers during the conference. I doubt that they actually took all those papers home either.

Game Theory

LOL. If love is a game.

Game Theory @ xkcd

(Click for full size)

__________
PS: On second thought, how do you win a love “game”? How do you lose? It doesn’t make sense.

Grammar Nazi

I don’t want to be a grammar nazi but I think people, especially students, should write properly. It would have been easier if I didn’t understand what is written so I can just ignore and delete it. Unfortunately, I’m not that old – no offence to old people – but I wonder if they’d write differently to a senior professor.

While of course, I shouldn’t expect proper grammar in an informal email to arrange for a consultation meeting, we are seeing this abbreviated electronic communication language in formal test and exam scripts too. Students in my class actually asked me recently whether they should write full sentences in the essay part of the coming final exam, and I thought “WTF?!” Some lecturers allow them to just give bullet points, they say, and only look for key points.

Call me old-fashioned, but I think proper grammar is very important. It doesn’t have to be perfect – I know mine isn’t – but one should be able to properly spell words and form sentences. When dealing with complex concepts and ideas, proper grammar helps us order our thoughts. It is also important to ensure that the information we wish to convey is correctly understood by the reader.

Salvation

Just so you know I am really bummed right now. Bummed. Yeah. PFFT!

So, is it too late to write about Terminator Salvation? There may be spoilers if you haven’t watched the movie, so consider yourself warned.

I wanted to watch it, then I didn’t, and then Chee Yoong asked if I wanted to watch the new Terminator – he’s paying – so I did. I wanted to watch it because Batman Christian Bale plays John Connor. Then I didn’t want to watch the movie because all the leaked stories and reviews made me realize that the whole franchise is beginning to sound really tired. Terminator 3 sucked. So the week it opened I watched Night at the Museum 2 instead, which was a load of fun and has the Jonas Brothers as singing little winged angels.

Badass three-part poster

All right, I enjoyed the action. My favorite part of the movie is seeing the old A-10 Thunderbolt II attack plane, one of my favorites, as the main (only?) fixed wing combat aircraft used by the Resistance. Although, I have to wonder how the Resistance in 2018 still manage to even have an air force. Hiding a fleet of aircraft is one thing, maintaining the supply of fuel, spares and ammunition to keep them flying is something else. It also seems that nuclear explosions only make huge mushroom clouds but no EMP nor radiation. Hmm…

Resistance raiders riding ancient Huey and Little Bird helicopters

Story-wise, we learn nothing much new about John Connor, who listens to his mother’s old tapes all the time. The story is mainly about Marcus Wright, the half-human, half-robot who may or may not want to kill Kyle Reese, Connor’s future father. When Reese is captured by Skynet, Connor goes off to rescue him and is fatally injured in the process. Oh, no! :P Wright offers Connors his heart to save him, which Connor accepts. So John Connor, leader of the Resistance and perhaps humanity in general has no problem accepting a heart from another person who’s still alive. In fairness, however, Connor already regards Wright as a thing instead of a person. Whatever. Anyway, I can’t help thinking the Terminator franchise can easily be extended and later linked to The Matrix.

John Connor the scary commando with tricked out M4

Anybody all excited to watch Transformers 2 next week? Me, not so much.

By the way, do you know that the real life Skynet is a network of British military communications satellite? You know, huh? Well, all right then. The first Skynet satellite was launched in 1969, so it was not named after the Terminator Skynet. I don’t know about the courier company, though.

__________
CREDIT: All pictures from Warner Bros. Pictures/Yahoo! Movies

WTF

I found a letter in my mail box last week. It was from mysterious phantom dude. All right, dude is not exactly mysterious because I actually know full his name and student ID number, and if I want to I can access his registration and academic records (and do what?).

Dude wrote that he experienced some problem with the network connection and forgot to save after dropping my class in the online registration system. My thought went back to why he didn’t print a confirmation slip (?). However, when I showed the letter to other staff members at the kulliyyah, they zoomed in on the saving part. The system immediately deregisters a student from a class once they click on the drop button. There is no save button. So whatcha saying, dude?

His second excuse is that he received a last minute notice to go for umrah. Strange, I thought. Umrah, the small pilgrimage, can be performed at any time during the year so you get to choose when to go. Having made plans to perform the umrah, even if the exact dates weren’t confirmed, dude shouldn’t have registered for the optional short semester in the first place.

Hmmm…

One thing, though, his letter was quite unexpectedly well-written with very few grammatical mistakes. So dude can write. The letters I received from students before were quite invariably so horribly written I wondered how they passed SPM English. Some of the letters were in fact in Malay, though again so horrible Malay I wondered how they passed SPM Malay.

So when the Education Minister asked recently whether English should be made a must-pass subject in SPM to improve our school-leavers’ proficiency in the language I thought, “WTF?!” These students whose letters I read and whose answer scripts I mark already passed SPM English and still their English is horrible.

Making English a compulsory and must-pass subject in SPM will not necessarily improve our English. Teaching mathematics and science in English won’t improve our English too but that’s for another day. The only way to improve command of the language is to improve teaching of the language itself. I was so shocked to read in the newspapers that grammar is no longer taught in schools. No wonder we are so frakked.

Keep the Faith

I chanced upon a music video on television one late afternoon a long time ago. Only eight or nine years old at the time, I didn’t understand a word of the lyrics, but the tune was forever imprinted in my mind. Though I never saw the video ever again nor heard the song until much later, I could always recall the tune in my head. It was my first and all time favorite song.

Fast forward to 1992 , I was at a departmental store in Seremban when I heard the song again on the PA system. This time I definitely had to ask. Though they were already playing a different song by the time I got to the DJ station, the music was unmistakably from the same band. The DJ showed me the album they were promoting, Keep the Faith, the then-latest fifth studio album by rock band Bon Jovi. Before that I’d never even heard of the band. Everybody in school was transitioning from Guns N’ Roses to Nirvana. I took one look at the audio cassette, decided that cover art was quite cool for a rock album, and bought a copy right away.

Keep the Faith is my very first music album purchase, and I bought it based solely on a vague memory of a song I didn’t even know the name of. Nevertheless, it is an awesome album that remains till this day my favorite and the only music album I know the words of all of its songs. The old audio cassette carries fourteen tracks but CDs sold today lack the songs Save a Prayer and Starting All Over Again.

It didn’t take long before I bought all of Bon Jovi’s previous albums including the 1986 Slippery When Wet that contains the song that started it all – Livin’ on a Prayer, and I’ve been buying all of their albums since, including the 100,000,000 Bon Jovi Fans Can't Be Wrong box set.

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During undergraduate a popular professor told us that the 2000 hit song It’s My Life was evil. I wondered if anybody took him seriously.