iphoting's Sink

I’m a nocturnal worker. My mind functions very quickly and creatively in the late nights, and this is usually the time at which essays get churned out and applications get coded.

Lately, I found this wonderful application for the mac called Nocturne which helpfully inverts the screen colours and add hue to it too. It’s extremely useful for dark places or where ever light is counter-productive. If you have a mac with light sensor, it can even automatically activate night mode when the lighting conditions fall below a certain configurable threshold.

LED powered LCD displays would have the best results in low lighting conditions, with night mode enabled.

Today was quite cool. Pastor Phil came to church to minister, but this time it was different. He painted a cross with Jesus with a tilted perspective on the huge canvas (roughly 2.5 m by 2 m) while preaching, and really, he’s quite good with using paint textures to bring out depth and detail. Through the use of blue, brown and white colours and the occasional dab of orange, red, and yellow, a very solemn yet hopeful scene is shown. Amusingly, he signed his name on the canvas first before he started, increasing the stakes of any severe mistakes. I’ll try to get a picture when church posts the sermon replays.

The last painting he painted (The Last Supper) at the previous service was sold for $50,000, and of course the money got donated back to church.

The Last Supper

The Cross

Last week, Carola Häggkvist from Sweden came to church and sang for us. It was brilliantly good and filled with great anointing. Throughout her whole ‘performance’, presence of God continued to be around and it was simply amazing.

Here’s one of the songs she sang, Invincible:-

And finally, Business and Management papers up next.

Sometime back, I complained very loudly about Fortiguard (read: faulty-guard) blocking essential and academic sites, obstructing access to research materials and what not. Amusingly, Scott Adams has it in his mind all along:-

How funny.

Oh yeah, Maths HL P3 was a gang rape; to quote them, “oh my gawd!”. What a great paper to end the examination season for most students. Now I’m wondering if I can even manage a 6 for Maths HL.

Some time back, I read a couple of blog entries by this guy who is very clever. Apparently, his class was assigned by his Literature teacher to come up with some mock exam questions on a few pieces of set poetry they have been issued and here, I quote, is his:-

With Reference

It’s exam time again, and you know the drill:

Sit here and be silent and write stuff and chill

yourself to the bone, but again I digress;

You’re reading this only because of your test.

This question’s ‘bout poems, about words in a verse,

Of which structure and meaning can be so diverse.

There’s sonnets and ballads and of course limerick,

Some read for pages; some others quite quick.

It goes without saying, you’ve already guessed,

What your answer to this must surely address.

Comment on the structure, or on the rhyme

of the poem in your essay, if you’ve got the time.

Content’s up to you, rebutt if you must,

But from two or three of your poems: Discuss.

Nice right? Then, here’s his response to the question, I quote:-

In Response

It’s exam time again, and unfortunately,

I’ve got to do this exam, by decree.

I really don’t want to, I have to confess;

Let’s just get this done so I can go for recess.

In the spirit of fun, I’ll stick to the style

Of the question in question, so that it’ll bring a smile

To the unfortunate soul who is marking this script

Since grading this paper will sure make you flip.

A look at the poem and it’s easy to see

That the poet’s intent was to make it funny

Through the structure and rhyme! And this essay

Will attempt to show how the humour is conveyed.

Firstly for structure, it’s clearly a sonnet;

Let’s just keep moving on; don’t keep bees in your bonnet.

Although that was obvious, the purpose is not

‘Cos sonnets are mostly in love songs a lot.

And this is no ballad, no sweet courtship song

If we’re talking ‘bout genre, this style is all wrong.

But if I could make an intelligent guess,

The content and diction would seem to suggest

That the poet was aiming to juxtapose

A question ‘bout poems not written in prose

With the rest of the questions; but that’s one aspect;

The other: that this poem seems to reflect

That sometimes the structure is inconsequential

It’s more likely the content would be more essential.

And I’m sure you’ll agree that this is the case:

The structure was something that just fell into place.

Now talking ‘bout rhyme; the poem, in fact;

The rhymin’ and timin’ would seem to attract

More readers, more students, to give an attempt

To answer the question with a bit less contempt.

That’s one of the uses; the other is thus:

The rhythmic verses makes humour a plus.

The rhyme scheme and rhythm can be said to produce

An effect on the poem not unlike Dr. Seuss.

The singsong-ish voice, the unserious tone

Only serves to make the content more shown

In a humourous way, and that makes you laugh

Even if it didn’t, it sure was enough.

For the whole satirical effect to come through

Don’t think too deeply; no meanings construe.

That poem and this were written for fun

Which exams obscure and destroy all in one.

Thus in conclusion, this essay is moot:

Both poems have no real meaning to boot.

The exam will be over when I put down this pen

So when I do: Let the party begin.

Impressive, don’t you think so? Seriously, I wonder what will an examiner do when (s)he sees a script which employs poetry, rather than prose, as a response.

Great, the external examinations are finally nearing the end and my mind feels sluggish and stale. I need to stretch my mind unconventionally and non-academically really hard. I guess it’ll be time soon enough to get my fitness back to speed and at the same time, to give both my piano and guitar, a good tickle. Oh, and I’ll be flying off to Hong Kong on the 21st and will be back just in time for prom. Drop me an email if you want anything (that I can reasonably buy). After prom, church camp awaits.

After that, I got to learn how to apply Bayes’ Theorem in some simple trend modelling, and go learn Objective-C programming. The message passing OOP model in Objective-C is quite new to me and I think I’ll need a magnitude of brain power to internalise it properly, and hopefully quickly.

Meanwhile, my reading list hasn’t shrunk and neither has my pile of unread books. Speaking of which, my room needs a major clean up.

Here’s a beautiful song, The Space In Between Us, by Building 429.

This windows machine feels perpetually sluggish. Can’t wait for my Macbook to be back, this time with a brand new casing.

I know I’m easily amused. A friend showed me this pretty funny blog post about hate-mail. Really, the witty responses to the hate-mail the author received are very good. Go check it out if you haven’t.

Then, I was clicking around the net and I noticed a referrer which I haven’t seen before. Quite amusing; that guy (he’s quite good at precision art or whatever you call that) said that I was “[s]o rich as to set up his own site & get it so professionally done”. That’s really complimentary, but seriously, I spend no more than S$12 a year keeping this site (which includes my mail and files) running smoothly (and hopefully professionally too).

At that, I realise that I haven’t announced free hosting offers for the past 4 years. So, I hereby anounce that you can get free hosting and email (subject to my terms and conditions) from my site by dropping me an email with your intentions on what to do with the space, such as running wordpress or your personal site (no illegal stuff). Please write at least 10 words but not more than 100 words in your description, and I’ll assign disk space according to your needs. Just ask again if you need more. Of course, if you insist on donating some of your spare change to help me fund some bills, you are welcome.

Well, today’s examinations were very amusing. I shall refrain from leaking any details for the well-being of everyone.

Sometime back, I read this interesting article, by Scott Adams, on what he terms ‘Happiness Smoothing’. I’ve been noticing this interesting phenomenon too. Here’s a snippet of what he wrote:-

When you see people who are struggling in life, you probably feel an urge to help. You might talk yourself out it, because you have your own problems, or you don’t know how to help in any lasting way, or there are just too many people in need. But you have the urge to help those less fortunate. It’s in your DNA. You’re good people.

On the flip side, when you see people who are happier than you, your natural urge is to guide them back to the average. For example, if you have a coworker who breezes through his own workload and uses the spare time to enjoy himself, your natural impulse is to ruin his day by dumping some of your work on him. You call it “teamwork,” and there’s no denying it boosts productivity, but that’s not your motivation. At some fundamental human level, you want the people who are happier than you to dial it back a notch. It’s in your DNA. Sometimes you’re not good people.

[...]

The second paragraph was the most interesting one.

Then, there’s this another article which was quite inspiring. It’s an interview with Mohammad Yunus, the founder of Grameen Bank and a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. Let me quote a part of it that was beautiful:-

[...]

So microcredit can be a social business. I don’t lend money to the poor people to make money myself. I lend money to the people to help them get out of poverty, so I can keep the interest rate low, because I don’t need to make money for myself. As long as I can cover the cost and run the company, that’s good enough. So that’s the idea for social business. So once we include this into the business world, tremendous things can happen in poverty alleviation, in nutrition, in health care, in child care, you name it -- whatever problem we see around the world can be framed, can be designed as a social business and address that.

Today we leave everything to the government. Let government solve all the problems. We citizens are free, we’re busy making money. That’s not the way it should be. We citizens, we individuals, are capable people addressing social issues. Maybe address a small social issue within my neighborhood, maybe within my district, within my village. Government has to cover the whole country, that’s the only difference. But I’m more innovative than the government. I’m more enterprising than the government.

(Emphasis mine)

Really, here comes the buzz word of the new era - social enterprise. Profit or non-profit, your business will get extra brownie points if you factor in the social concerns and the intention to improve the welfare of the society the business is operating in.

Don’t believe me? Even Switchfoot is doing just that, offering a free and really great song for download and encouraging users to contribute time, and or money to Habitat for Humanity.

Really, it speaks about this story about the StarFish Thrower:-

An older man taking a solitary walk along the beach saw a young man from a distance and thought he was dancing. As he grew closer, he realized that the young man was picking up starfish --one at a time -- and throwing them back into the ocean.

As he approached, the older man told the younger one, “You can’t possibly make a difference -- there are miles and miles of beaches and thousands of starfish.”

In response, the young man picked up another starfish, moved gracefully to the shoreline, and threw it in... “Made a difference to that one.”

The older man moved on and the young one kept on with his self-appointed task.

The rest of the day the older man could not forget what the young one had said. And, the next morning, he went to the beach again and this time joined the young starfish thrower.

A departure from the queue of drafts to write this after reading an article that NUS ranking dropped from 19th to 33rd.

I’m pretty happy about that though. I’ve had enough of their pompous and arrogant advertisement of how good the school is. If you’ve read the article, the NUS president in essence said that the quality is there, just that the methodology changed. If that’s the case, could students who have done consistently well in their school internal examinations, well above the entry requirement of the university, be granted admission despite doing poorly for the A Levels, because the bell curve got shifted? Looking at the way they present themselves, I’m willing to believe that they will grant no exceptions. Likewise, for their ranking.

What amuses me the most was that they did badly in the staff-to-student ratio component, especially when the government is wanting greater intake numbers.

Still, as I’ve always said, rankings don’t matter much. Here’s another hilarious commentary about the world-class elite school of higher learning. Oh by the way, that (in)famous Dr Thio Li-ann is from NUS.

I hope I won’t ever have to end up there.