iphoting's Sink

I always find comments from youths (14-16 year olds) extremely amusing. They seem to have just the right amount of the lack of innocence, and at the same time, they do not have much psychological baggage.

Tabula rasa kind of response, the pure ‘innocence’.

I’ve got this little cousin who’s 7 years old with huge eyes and all. He’s able to use reverse psychology to please or curry favour somebody to do or get something for him. The things he say and look out for are absolutely brilliant. Sometimes, the obvious might just be the best answer.

The exams which whizzed by was quite an experience. Didn’t really prepare sufficiently but I think it’s suffice for a mid-year common test gauge.

Ok, I’m off to more sleep; I was sick with a runny nose on Tuesday and Wednesday, killing off most of my studying time for sleep, hoping to recover in time for the Thursday exams.

Couple of days ago while I was walking around the school, I happened to locate a large pile of single-sided paper dumped in a corner next to the trash bin. Deciding that a free and large flow of scrap paper would be useful for my mathematical workings, I decided to bring all of them home.

Paper wastage is a hallmark of this organisation and ‘environmental friendliness’ should be assessed under one of the awards, such as Organisational Effectiveness.

Funny.

What a great joke, the paper 3 for Chemistry is the easiest paper I’ve ever seen in my life. For the first time in my experience that I can complete a paper, understand and be able to answer every single question. Baring careless mistakes, I’m guessing this is a supplement to the ‘excitement’ to the other 120 marks that is to be gained. For the first time, I could finally via the first principles (roughly), write out the mechanisms, with curly arrows, without memorising the notes.

Still, there’s nothing to be happy about; there’s more work to be done.

As I read the series of books by Robert T. Kiyosaki, I have come to understand something that is pretty amazing that matches my observations. Most (as I’ve not seen all) of the extremely wealthy people in my church have these things in common.

First, they are extremely hardworking and on average clock in 16 hour work days. Second, they are extremely generous in their donations.

These two observations taught me many things about the game of economics. Though the people are extremely hardworking and work long hours, they aren’t working directly for their pay-check. Instead, they work on ways to further increase their passive and non-direct income, usually via investments or business systems building, making money work from them, which in turn will make them even richer, whether they work or not (in their business).

Their generosity (in the millions) shows two things. Either they are really generous and/or that they understand the concept of money and are not enslaved or addicted to it.

The cool thing is that the education system is made in such a way to condition products to think about ‘finding a job’ after graduation to work for money. They say that this regimental system came from Prussia when they needed disciplined products to sustain their armies.

Like they say, poverty is a mindset; being wealthy should by extension be a mindset too.

These concepts are pretty interesting, but of course, this post is too slip shod to mean anything. I need a few free days to think about it. After all in the words of Henry Ford, “Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason why so few engage in it”.

That aside, here’s a manifesto that even Albert Einstein signed.

Life in this edition of IB isn’t all that easy. Students are faced with choices which they have to make, and wise choices generally work better and produce the least suffering in the long term. However, to be able to make wise choices require the student to have a very realistic and strong ability to prioritise decisions or effects of the decisions.

Recently, I’m faced with this thought incident.

Year 6 students have 3 major things that they need to work on before the school starts and let’s assume, for this experiment, there’s only time to do one thing completely. Would you choose to 1) Study for the Mid-Year Examinations, or 2) Complete your World Literature Assignment(s), or 3) Study for your IOC passages?

Looking at the grand scheme of things, in the macro scale, the order of importance of the tasks ranks this way: 3 > 2 > 1.

However, given the crazy Asian or Kiasu mentality, it appears to be 1 > 2 > 3. This quite explains why students in the IB dip. programme complain of being ‘very stressed up’, at almost every juncture of the course.

Ideally, I would love to have more time outside school hours so that I could do 1, 2, and then 3, as I find my time spent in school tends to be royally wasted.

So, Ladies and Gentlemen, what do you think?

Apple products spoilt me; the Macintosh philosophy raised my expectations on software and lowered my tolerance on poor usability.

These days, I find my $0 K610i somewhat difficult to use; the S$400 Nokia N73 felt more like a paperweight; and the $700 dopod feels like part of a dustbin.

Usability of mobile phones has drastically fallen although its main purpose, to make and receive phone calls, has remained unchanged. However, the new phone models I see do not make this basic usage any easier nor efficient – clumsy HID (keypad), unintuitive commonly used features, and totally unnecessary extra buttons around the keypad which give rise to input mistakes, hindering usability. The most annoying ‘feature’ of all phones I’ve seen is the severe lack of responsiveness in the interface of the phone.

In the case of the N73, I’m surprised that I need to wait a whole second for the menu to fully appear before I could activate a function on the menu. Yet, the model seems to be a rather popular one around.

The Windows Mobile OS seems to have the usability option hidden in some crazy option page that I didn’t manage to locate and activate. Seriously, I’m wondering how on earth people use these devices to improve their productivity.

Still, thus far, the Palm OS philosophy, though lacking in substantiated progress, is rather similar to the Macintosh platform. The emphasis on a unified user-interface design made most 3rd party applications easy to use on first sight. The feature which I’m extremely pleased with in the Palm OS is the menu bar on the top of the screen, revealed upon tapping the application’s name.

Conceptually, it is exactly the same as that of the Macintosh’s permanent menu bar, which arguably is the Mac’s greatest and IMO most powerful (and efficient) aspect.

Although visible development on the Palm OS has apparently stalled, there has yet to be a sufficiently capable replacement unfortunately. I can only sigh; my Tungsten | T is starting to fail (in terms of hardware) and I need a solution really fast.

For the fun of it, here are the things I use my Palm for:-

• Bible
• Bus Guide
• Contacts
• Date Book
• To-Do
• Train Journey Duration Calculator
• Scribbles

The downside is that it lacked WiFi capabilities. If not, it’ll have been my web browser on the go too. And no, GPRS/3G data charges are too expensive to be practical.

To close this entry, there’s this article that I came across that I’ll link. Ways to Live and Not Merely Exist.

Point 23 come with the greatest impact to me – Play with children. “Children, more than anyone else, know how to live. They experience everything in the moment, fully. When they get hurt, they really cry. When they play, they really have fun. Learn from them, instead of thinking you know so much more than them. Play with them, and learn to be joyful like them.”

That said, I’ll probably touch my Google Reader on alternative weeks only.

God Bless.

Took me long enough, but I found this blog buried in my Google Reader which is actually worth reading, for laughs too.

Darned, I need to study even faster; I’m running out of time.