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.