Tinker, Tailor

at a fast food joint.

1. CNY music sounds horrible. It’s playing everywhere, ad nauseam, ad infinitum. And imagine - as long as you’re in this region, you’re gonna have to listen to that stuff every year for the rest of your pathetic life.

2. All the nice restaurants are closed. (Macdonalds is not a nice restaurant.)

3. CNY “goodies” don’t taste good. And there’s nothing else to eat. (Okay, some mandarin oranges are ok, bak kua can be nice in moderation, and some people can make pretty awesome pineapple tarts…)

4. You have to visit certain people, only on CNY. You don’t visit them more than once a year for a reason. (The once a year minimum will qualify you for a place in their wills.)

5. The people you really want to visit are busy visiting people they don’t really want to visit.

6. You have to say nice things you don’t really mean. (XNKL, GXFC, WSRY, etc. )

7. You have to listen to people say nice things they don’t mean. (XNKL, GXFC, WSRY, etc. )

8. Freedom of speech is curtailed - there are many things you’re not allowed to say. (Sorry, I’m not allowed to give examples.)

9.
a. You ask yourself why the ang pow you got contains so little money.
b. Or, people ask you when you’re getting a boyfriend/girlfriend. That brief pause right after your answer indicates that they’re trying to think of someone available (and is probably ugly or psychotic or both).
c. Or, when you’re getting married. (”After we have children,” you feel like answering.)
d. Or when you’re gonna have children. (”Not after seeing the kind of kids you have!”)
e. Or, (to themselves) why the angpow you gave them contains so little.
f. Or, when they can stop visiting you. (But don’t forget to include them in your will.)

10. Chinese New Year is racist.

The title may sound scary, but I think the cartoon is easy to understand. And don’t worry, you’re not the only one who’s never heard of solipsism

Anyway, this is the fulfillment of a promise made in an earlier post:

I’m working on a little cartoon thingy, which I hope will turn out to be interesting, weird, and possibly a little disturbing. I’m revealing this to motivate myself so I won’t abandon this project halfway. Please nag at me if you don’t see it by the end of this month. Thank you very much.

There’s no need to nag now

But I’d like brutally honest comments about it - weird? disturbing? funny? silly? inane? boring?
Let me know.

Note: this post may not display properly on a RSS feed reader. I’m suspecting it’s not displaying on Internet Explorer either. Do let me know if it does.

Update: Roxanne violates copyright laws with her own version (with better effects). Can someone recommend me a lawyer?

Update 2: Someone has kindly helped me host the file, so it should be visible to Internet Explorer users now. Upgrade to Firefox if you’re still stuck with Internet Explorer.

Here you go… just click on the ‘next’ button to continue.

Last night, I gave this guy a black eye.

It was pretty bad - he said it was bad, and he asked for ice right away.

I wonder what story he had to give this morning when he went to work. They wouldn’t believe him if he told the truth anyway.

He’s not the only one in pain.

My calves, my thigh, my butt were conspiring against me, forcing me into slow motion if necessary, or no motion if I could help it. It’s times like these that make me realise that staircase handrails aren’t there just for aesthetic purposes - some people actually need them.

My back too, my torso, my shoulders, my arms, and when I raise them, my armpits too (I never suspected that there were muscles there). Oh, and a sprained little finger.

How I wish for a good massage.

Notes to self:
1. When calves start to experience cramps, it’s time to stop.
2. When thighs also start to experience cramps, it’s really time to stop.
3. When it is impossible to move around without limping, for goodness’ sake, stop!
4. You are not superhuman. Really.

But dang, did we have a good game. Black eyes, sprains, cramps - we’d do it all over again.

I’ve been asking a lot of my friends to read How to Do What You Love by Paul Graham. Then I remembered that I have a blog.

Go read it if any of the following applies:
- you hate your job
- you dislike your job
- you have a job
- you don’t have a job, and thinking about what to do next
- you’re a student but will eventually look for a job

It’s a chapter-length essay, but definitely worth reading.

The 19 Jan 2006 episode of the Nature podcast had an intriguing segment on how men and women respond differently to physical revenge.

I hope I remember the facts right (since I heard it a few days back) - an experiment has shown that men take pleasure in the physical suffering (punishment) of those who have wronged them, while women show empathy.

Surprised at the findings?

This probably means that if you’ve wronged a guy, you’re more likely to get beaten up than if you’ve wronged a girl.

Lest the girls start to feel angelic, the experiment doesn’t say anything about non-physical forms of revenge.

So if a girl hates you, she may not beat you up. But she might curse you, taunt you, slander you, and everything else (as long as you don’t get physically hurt).

Beat me up any time!**

** For females only

I can finally breathe, now that my feeds are showing on RSS aggregators like bloglines and newsgator.

Those of you who stalk here through RSS feeds, welcome back - you have a backlog of over 10 posts to read

Someone popped me this meme. Darn, can’t she leave me alone??

Ah well, since I’m experiencing some brain downtime, I’ll give her some face…

4 jobs you’ve had in your life
Toilet cleaner (don’t ask)
Carpenter (don’t ask)
Manual labourer (don’t ask)
National Serviceman

Note: none of them are current. Ok, the last one is for a few weeks every year.

4 movies you could watch over and over
Once is enough. Twice at most. But over and over implies at least thrice. You probably have a problem if you actually watch movies over and over.

4 TV shows you love(d) to watch
I don’t watch TV.
(NBA on TV doesn’t count, cos I don’t watch it - I study it.)

4 places you’ve lived
Clementi
Bukit Panjang
Pasir Panjang
Nee Soon Cramp (it was a few months, but it felt like years)

Note to stalkers: none are current. Don’t waste your time.

4 places you’ve been on vacation to
I just noticed that vacation probably comes from vacate, and a quick check with a dictionary confirms it.
People normally say “I’m going on a vacation.” The next time, I’ll just say “I’m going to vacate!” That would be fun.

4 places you would rather be
This question is reveals a deep-seated dissatisfaction with life and the current state of affairs. Can’t I be happy with where I am right now? Stupid meme.

That said, I suppose I’d rather be in heaven - the variety described in a certain Arabic book. Will someone kindly let me know how I can acquire a b0mb?

4 of your favourite foods
Children are starving in Africa, and we’re talking about our favourite foods? How insensitive!
But chocolate is nice (minimum 44% cocoa solids). I don’t mind really smooth ice cream either.

4 websites you visit daily
Websites? This is so passé - so 1997. I’d rather answer “4 RSS feeds you subscribe to.”

4 tagged
The meme stops here.

And where are the REAL questions? Like
- 4 books that changed you
- 4 people you met who’ve changed your life
- 4 philosophical worldviews that you found feasible at one point of your life or another

Sigh. We live in a shallow generation.

Updates:
- Tym gives evidence that she is not shallow.
- Elaine gives good evidence as well.
- LMD’s attempt to prove her depth backfires.

testing

Yeah, I haven’t been blogging much lately. Here’s why…

- I’ve been busy embroiled in a less-than-purposeful linguistic issue. But it’s certainly more fun than dealing with people who think that doing an obvious impersonation of an anonymous blogger (who is out to mudsling others) is a cardinal sin. The best part is the virtual lynching going on, even though the mob doesn’t really know who the impersonator is. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, don’t bother finding out - it’s a waste of time, unless you’re doing a study on online mobs (which I’m kinda doing).

- I’m working on a little cartoon thingy, which I hope will turn out to be interesting, weird, and possibly a little disturbing. I’m revealing this to motivate myself so I won’t abandon this project halfway. Please nag at me if you don’t see it by the end of this month. Thank you very much.

- I’ve been exchanging emails with the tech support from both bloglines and blogsome, because my last few posts have not appeared on bloglines, and a number of my faithful readers have not read those posts, which gives me even less motivation to blog. Until blogsome solves the problem (they say it’ll be solved probably today or tomorrow), I won’t be blogging very much.

I enjoy reading stories to kids. Probably because no one ever pays any attention when I talk, so seeing a kid sit there wide-eyed in rapt attention while I read does wonders for my self-esteem.

The only thing I don’t like is when the kid asks me to read the story again. Punishment for not reading well enough the first time? Actually, young children do need repetition, and they enjoy it. But I’d always ask to read another book - it’s hard for me to read with expression and enthusiasm if I’m reading the same stuff within 5 minutes.

Anyway, some years ago, this dad was showing me the Arthur’s adventure series of interactive stories he bought for his son. The dad was glowing with pride as his son clicked through the interactive features of the story, as if the son was on track to become a Nobel Prize laureate.

I wasn’t impressed, and I felt that the son wasn’t learning very much, but I kept my mouth shut since the dad wasn’t going to listen to me anyway.

What triggered me to write this post was this article - Interactive learning fails reading test (via Slashdot).

“Teachers and parents should be aware that an interactive story book may provide their children with more entertainment than education.”

I may be a geek and I may be in love with technology, but if I have kids of my own, they won’t be touching the computer very much. And none of these interactive story crap.

In fact, when parents come to me on advice for their kids, one of the first things I say is “read to your kid.” It’s not just educational, it’s emotionally bonding. (The other advice I give is “let them go out and play.”)

A related book to check out is The Flickering Mind: The False Promise of Technology in the Classroom and How Learning Can Be Saved. I borrowed it from the library once, but I didn’t get around reading it. I suspect that it’s worth a look.

Drinking coffee at a friend’s place on a rainy afternoon…

I’m all ready to move to tinkertailor.wordpress.com, but right now they don’t allow tweaking of the templates, meaning that I can’t put a picture of my choice (not a big deal) and I can’t add my preferred stat counter (big deal). They do have a built-in stat counter, but I’m not happy with it, as it doesn’t give me enough detail. My intuition tells me that I could do some hacks to add in my own, but I’m just not in the mood to hack these days.

And my new posts aren’t appearing on online RSS readers like bloglines and newsgator - the last one to appear was my december 27 post. *sigh* So my readers on bloglines aren’t reading this now….

Blogsome sucks. The servers have been slow, and now this…

Consider this from Shakespeare’s A Comedy of Errors, Act IV, Scene 3:

There’s not a man I meet but doth salute me
As if I were their well-acquainted friend

A lot of people would declare that his should be used instead of their, including some self-proclaimed grammar experts (I call them grammar terrorists).

I have been using the singular they occasionally, especially when I don’t want to specify the gender. For example, I might write:

Someone came up to me. I didn’t like the look on their face.

instead of:

Someone came up to me. I didn’t like the look on that person’s face.

In this case, there isn’t much difference. But if I continue on the narrative, the use of that person can become more cumbersome. Consider:

Someone came up to me. I didn’t like the look on that person’s face. Nor did I like the person’s smell, as I soon discovered.

which doesn’t read as smooth as:

Someone came up to me. I didn’t like the look on their face. Nor did I like their smell, as I soon discovered.

Don’t like it? Let me quote from Language Log (Shakespeare used they with singular antecedents so there):

By all means, avoid using they with singular antecedents in your own writing and speaking if you feel you cannot bear it. Language Log is not here to tell you how to write or speak. But don’t try to tell us that it’s grammatically incorrect. Because when a construction is clearly present several times in Shakespeare’s rightly admired plays and poems, and occurs in the carefully prepared published work of just about all major writers down the centuries, and is systematically present in the unreflecting conversational usage of just about everyone including Sean Lennon, then the claim that it is ungrammatical begins to look utterly unsustainable to us here at Language Log Plaza. This use of they isn’t ungrammatical, it isn’t a mistake, it’s a feature of ordinary English syntax that for some reason attracts the ire of particularly puristic pusillanimous pontificators, and we don’t buy what they’re selling.

I wish I knew this stuff when I was in secondary school - I definitely would have used the singular they in my next English composition, and hope that my English teacher would fall for my trap and put a bright red circle around my carefully-placed they, then we could have a heated argument where I would quote Shakespeare and the rest, and finally prove to them that I was indeed correct (as usual), and thus obnoxiously show my superiority over them.

Sometimes I wonder why so many of my teachers couldn’t stand me.

I was at this glitzy party - glitzy not just because there were a couple of local celebrities - there were a lot of camera flashes.

Even before we stepped into the club, the official photographer with an intimidating camera had already taken a couple of pictures of me and my friend, and soon asked us to pose for the camera.

I declined, and requested that they don’t use my pictures for any of their publications (the party was organised by a large media corporation here). Although I didn’t ask the photographer to delete my photos, she kindly offered to do so, and I gladly accepted the offer. Being a photographer myself, I know how hard it is to want to delete pictures of gorgeous people (maybe that’s why she was happy to delete mine).

* * * * *

Anyway, I’ve been trying to look for information on the legal issues of photography in Singapore - about where and what kinds of pictures photographers are allowed to take, the legal rights of photographers, and so on.

So far, I’ve found very little useful info on this - a lot is based on heresay or common sense (unfortunately the law is seldom commonsensible) or personal interpretations of the law. It’s about time for something definitive and human-readable to be published, especially with the recent proliferation of digital cameras and camera phones.

What would be great is an article similar to this US one - New digital camera? Know how, where you can use it:

You can take photos any place that’s open to the public, whether or not it’s private property. A mall, for example, is open to the public. So are most office buildings (at least the lobbies). You don’t need permission; if you have permission to enter, you have permission to shoot.

In fact, there are very few limits to what you’re allowed to photograph. Separately, there are few limits to what you’re allowed to publish. And the fact that they’re separate issues — shooting and publishing — is important.

It’s worth reading if you take loads of pictures (other than your lovely self, you camwhore). I have no idea what is valid here in Singapore, and what isn’t, and I hope someone would show us soon.

Someone asked me a question, so this post is written in response to that question. I’ll reveal the question later in the post.

When Microsoft launched Windows XP, it was a huge affair. Lots of hype, buzz, excitement, etc. Everyone was impressed by how it looked (except the Mac users), and how useful it would be.

Then we actually started using it.

We found that it wasn’t terribly stable, sometimes unpredictable, sometimes slow and unresponsive; it could do with more memory, and was often down because of bugs and viruses. In short, Windows XP wasn’t as great as it seemed during the product launch.

Many of us eventually started disliking, even hating Windows XP.

Some of us felt like we had no choice - we couldn’t do without it - just have to live with it (so we’re now still stuck with it).

Others (like myself) decided to use alternatives (like Mac OS or Linux) as well - unable to break away from Windows XP, but sufficiently lured by alternatives systems. The bravest ones got rid of Windows XP completely, and moved to the alternatives.

Windows XP was launched with lots of buzz, and so was Mac OS. Linux was not, even though it’s now the most popular operating system for web servers. My point here is, the quality of the product cannot be judged from the nature of the product’s launch.

Now, to the question that I referred to at the start of this post.

I told someone that I don’t really like weddings.

Why not? I was asked.

A wedding is just a product launch - it doesn’t really matter how big or grand it is. What matters is what happens every day after the wedding. Otherwise, you’d be thinking of upgrades before too long.

This Guy is blogging! Darn, now I have another blog to follow.

The guy, Guy Kawasaki, is probably best known as an ex-Apple evangelist, but he’s also a well-known venture capitalist and author now. I’ve read at least 3 of his books, including Art of the Start (which I thought I blogged about, but I can’t find the post), Rules for Revolutionaries, and How to Drive Your Competition Crazy. All I remember about those books is that they are good.

Anyway, here’s what he’ll be blogging about:

Not that you can hold me to this, but I’ll write about entrepreneurship, venture capital, innovation, public speaking, Macintosh, and hockey.

I shared the lift with a middle-aged couple.

As soon as the door opened at the ground floor, the husband was out the door, walking briskly. The wife who was slower out the door, started half-running, trying to catch up with him.

Eventually, she closed the gap, and both of them seemed to slow down a little. She was soon walking beside him on the path, with a healthy distance between them - healthy for complete strangers, but not so healthy for a married couple. Perhaps the gap between them was not more than 2 feet only because one of them would be off the footpath if the gap was any wider.

Soon, they reached a small flight of steps leading to another path. The man, having stronger legs, moved up the steps easily and soon disappeared from my view. The wife was still struggling, barely halfway up the flight of stairs.

What love.

Then I remember that 3 couples I know are getting married within the next 2 months. They’re probably wildly in love now.

Then I remember Ambrose Bierce’s definition of “love” in his Devil’s Dictionary:

A temporary insanity curable by marriage…

It’s strange. A lot of people come to me for advice, even though I often seem unqualified in the areas in question. Like married life. Or handling children (ok, I do know a little about this, although some might strongly disagree). Or even, divorce…

I’ve seen so many older couples living together little evidence of affection. They claim to like each other, but it’s more like they’ve gotten used to the mutual antagonism for so long that it has become a part of their existence. Is antagonism too strong. Fine - they have mutual tolerance.

But where’s the love?

How many couples have had their love ‘cured’ by marriage? In previous generations, you just shut up and put up - divorce was not even an option. These days, couples are getting divorced before they hit 30. I was 23 when a 29-year-old friend was talking to me about her divorce plans. They ran out of love, so it was time to move on.

I hope my soon-to-be-married friends see better days.

Love, when you’re married, takes effort, and it’s a decision you have to make when you wake up every morning.