In response to 'deep's long comment from yesterday:

Funny you should mention 'incentives.' Been reading 'Freakonomics,' have you? I'm not sure what you mean by that but, especially for GP, essay questions clearly do not reward unthinking regurgitaion of material. The nature of the exam itself encourages "understanding and interpretation" of the materials pertaining to the subject, so the problem isn't the exam per se.

I think a lot of it is the way we're brought up to study. Memorizing from a book actually looks like you're studying -- giving assurance to your ever-watchful parents that you aren't wasting your time socializing with friends, watching TV, or whatever other thing you would rather be doing than reading and re-reading a bunch of nonsense words. The incentive is that your parents won't nag at you. The disincentive is having to participate in a family drama.

Why do people forget what they "studied" immediately after their paper? Memorization is baby food: a melange of pre-chewed, pre-digested thoughts we have no claim of ownership to. It's essential for a baby to get started on solid food, but not very substantial for grown people like ourselves. Memorizing stuff is much easier to swallow than having to acquire, think about, analyze, verify and apply it, which is what you're required to do at your level. If you've done the work in hunting, preparing and chewing the food for yourself, you're more likely to remember what it was. If you're given mush to eat, what it actually was will forever be a mystery to you.

Memorizing stuff is reassuring to ourselves as well. There's a certainty to the material we memorize. It must be right, therefore we must memorize it. Conversely, we memorized it, therefore it must be right. But if we actually thought about the material, we risk doubting it and then we have to go through an ardous process of having to discover the truth for ourselves. That's a scary way to prepare for an exam, but that's what learning is.

Again, I'm not saying memorization isn't important, but it is overemphasized in our study culture much to our detriment. We lack entrepreneurs because risk aversion is so deeply ingrained in us from young, but that's the least of our problems. A people that relies on memorization without questioning and understanding the material first is a people easily "brainwashed," to use a term our students so like to use, to do the bidding of others.

Wish we could keep Abby ourselves, but we already have 2 cats. Kaiser, you know. This is Momo, our other cat. Oh, and the latest report from the shelter is that Abby's adapting well. She's out of her cage and mingling more amicably with the other cats now. Still, there's nothing like having a good home.

What's the role of memorized material in a written exam? It really depends on what skill the candidate is being examined for.

If we were still hiring civil service personnel for the dynastic Chinese court, memorized texts are all-important because they reflect the candidate's ability to be absolutely accurate in keeping records and in passing on information that, without his (not her) personal trustworthiness, would be unverifiable and thus useless in helping a superior officer trying to access the information make any intelligent decisions.

If we were still an oral culture, our whole history, mythology, culture, belief system and laws reside fully in the memory of a single archivist, usually a storyteller or bard. Candidates seeking to succeed the incumbent storyteller must faithfully memorize word for word the entire oral history of the people and in a public examination narrate the entire story tracing generations of different families and their exploits from the time of the earliest creation myths.

Some cultures are so serious about the exam that the chief examiner, the incumbent himself, is required to instantly club the candidate to death at the first error in the examination. He will then train a new candidate until one who renders a flawless narration can be found. Why so serious? It's because nothing about the people has been written down. Any error in the telling completely messes up the people's identity and beliefs, and errors compound themselves like in the game "broken telephone." And unless stringent, unforgiving standards are set, the people will never be able to know themselves with any certainty.

Life has got much more complicated since then. Information is not a problem for most of us to access. Not because of the Internet, but because practically everyone today can read and write. Today's exams aren't just about memorization skills. Especially at JC level, the skills being tested are mainly problem-solving skills. There is a series of questions through which the candidate demonstrates skills in pattern-recognition, logical reasoning, and moral awareness (especially in GP); and it is in his or her abilities in these areas that achievement is recognized.

Notice that many examinations are of the "closed-book" variety. The skills the candidate brings to play need to be practiced way beforehand. Moreover, the materials the candidate brings into the exam hall have to be stored within easily accessible locations in the brain. So yes, memorization is a crucial factor in any written exam. The more facts memorized, the more options one has in finding a solution to the problem at hand. The more toys you bring, the more different games we can play, I always say.

The problem comes when students stop at the memorization stage and think that reproducing notes, textbook pages and other copyright material as verbatim as possible is what will score them the most marks. Different skill for a different exam for a different time. Sorry.

The biggest nightmare for me is marking scripts that are obviously memorized and plonked down near vabatim without showing any understanding of the concept being referred to, or any appreciation of the question being answered, but rather using it because the topic appears similar.

We still keep reminding our students to accurately recall names, locations, events from the real-world to substantiate the solutions they are proposing on their exam scripts. That takes memory. BUT we also need to see skill in selecting the appropriate memes and in shaping them in a form relevant to the question in order to award marks.

Mei is right, and I should have made myself clearer in my previous entry. These days, memorization is still important in an exam, but it just isn't enough. The good news is, if you spend less time reading and re-reading your textbooks trying to memorize chunks of paragraphs that don't make sense, and more time inquiring into; discussing; and making observations about what you have just read with someone else (not necessarily your teacher) you tend to remember it a lot easier as you seek to understand what it's all about.

So why are y'all still wasting time reading this rubbish? Go study!

Still busy with marking. New topic: Should scientists be concerned with moral issues? Should be lots of scope for an interesting discussion, particularly as we consider the duties, obligations and responsibilities of the scientist to self and to society, and how the scientist might cope with conflicts between his/her professional conduct and his/her personal ethics especially in the more controversial fields of study.

It's interesting to note, however, that our students still place more emphasis on memorizing and reproducing their lecture notes as verbatim as possible rather than actually considering their material and discussing what they understand with respect to the question. Regardless of our push towards thinking skills, our students still rely on memory as the key indicator of their intelligence, and assume that we will reward them for it.

About half a year left to patch up the damage. It's a living.

Watson ate a fairly long entry. No, didn't save it. Complacent, lah. No morale to retype. Not tonight, anyway. Bah.

DSCN0714

DSCN0714,
originally uploaded by Xmac2005.

The authorities want to know everything! First, MDA fines people who do not report that they do not own a TV. Now the General Office wants to be informed if we notice that there are no defects in the toilet!

Guess it's always nice to know you're doing a good job!

Marking season begins anew. Currently marking a question on whether the Internet has made a positive or negative impact on our society. The students generally interpret the question as requiring them to point out as many 'net applications and services as possible and decide if they are "good" or "bad." But "impact" is more than being just about features, functions and (side) effects. It refers more to how the 'net has made certain irrevocable changes to our society because of its nature and because of how we use it, and to evaluate if we have bettered our lives/selves/society through these changes, or if we are now worse-off than ever because of these changes.

Once again, I ask myself if I am expecting too much from the kids. But then again, why should I lower my expectations to accommodate them when they will benefit so much more if they can rise to meet them instead?

In other news, we took Abby to her new home last evening. She wasn't happy with the arrangement and we felt like we betrayed her, allowing her to become so comfortable in our house, then pushing her away to live in an orphanage, so to speak. Hope she can find a more permanent home with nice people to look after her soon. Sigh.

Since yesterday we've accumulated a mass of exam scripts to mark. But it's the last weekend of the June hols so we're having 1 last fling before getting stuck back into our marking loads again.

Went with June to watch Silent Hill. Silent Hill 3 -- the game -- creeped me out but the movie came nowhere close. What a disappointment. The movie tried its best with the use of darkness and fog; deep, steep stairwells; and amazing environmental transformation effects. The music was atmospheric, as were the sound effects; all adding up to a creepy ghost town with some pretty disturbed residents, human and otherwise.

A movie is no game, though. Firstly, we know very well that the protagonist isn't going to die halfway through the movie 'cos that'll be the end of the narrative, right there. Um... you know what I mean, right? In the game, at least there is a sense of danger that your avatar could perish in spectacular fashion, and even though that eventuality simply prompts a reload, you still have to think about possible solutions to get past the hazard to continue the story.

Secondly, in the game, you control the pacing of your avatar. You can take your time to observe the surroundings and take in all the ghastly details, building up a sense of dread about opening the next door or descending a dreary staircase. In the movie you're just rushed through the process, following along, having no say in the decision-making process. It's the difference between a carnival ghost train ride and personally exploring the house with a reputation for being haunted in your neighbourhood.

Thirdly, the game makes you feel almost completely alone and friendless whereas the movie crams in too many other characters who seem to want to help. Not that everyone can be trusted, of course, but generally the movie loses the sense of isolation that might have been another fear to exploit.

The monsters in the movie are also quite disappointing. Well, they weren't all that scary in the game either. They were just obstacles to get through to the next objective, but still... The zombie nurses in the game put my nerves on edge, mostly because of their disjointed, misshapen bodies and their disturbing, shuffling gait. But the nurses in the movie have to be played by real people, and they got what looked like a company of modern dance performers to imitate the movement of their game counterparts. Unfortunately, I saw the dancers, not the movement, so another highly anticipated thrill lost.

As in many other horror stories, it's the people that are the real monsters. Fanatic, extreme, self-righteous, conformist, sheep-like human beings that do really nasty things to other people because of their differences. In that respect, at least, the movie got it right.

Some bits also probably censored for the NC-16 rating. The censors with their sharp scissors are the scariest of all.

Oh, my. Vacation's over already. 4 weeks blew by just like that and tomorrow it's back to the old grind again.

In Bali (and I suppose in many other parts of the world too) the kids take their exams first, then they enjoy their holidays. Here in Singapore, we let the kids have their holiday first so that they can use the time to study for their exam which we administer as soon as they come back to school. Pragmatic till the end, we are.

Hope the kids are ready for GP come daybreak!

Meet Abby. We are temporarily sheltering her while a place is being prepared for her at a home for stray cats in Punggol.

Meantime, we're also hoping someone will adopt her for good. She's already sterilized and uses the sandbox instinctively. She's gentle and affectionate with us, though she doesn't get along well with Kaiser at all. She'll probably have a hard time living with so many other cats at the home.

Any takers?

Just to balance things, Bali wasn't all that terrible, in case you got the wrong idea from my last entry. It was quite a culture shock at first seeing what it means to have tourism as the main source of income for these folks and hence, every tourist becomes a juicy fruit to wring dry. Once we got wise to this pattern of behaviour, we dealt with it and we really did enjoy our stay.

There were nice people around too. Like the free shuttle bus driver who took us back to our hotel anyway, even though we boarded the wrong shuttle by mistake and the route took us in the opposite direction from where we were going. Also the folks in the main establishments smiled at us a lot but didn't try to make over-friendly conversation, thankfully leaving us alone to browse. And once June got the hang of bargaining, she played the game well and we did get some good rapport from the sarong dealers on Jln Pantai Kuta, where the traditional market is located.

And people aside, Bali is really beautiful. The environment varies so much, from beaches both calm and tumultuous; terraced agricultural greenery; grand mountains and great lakes.

We were there to relax, and relax we did: We half-slept in a large sheltered massage bed on a cliff overlooking the Indian Ocean at our hotel in Tanah Lot.

We alternately baked in the sun on the beach in Benoa and dipped in the hotel pool to cool off so many times we lost count of our trips back and forth -- well, I did anyway, June just slept under a large umbrella on the beach.

We got to watch World Cup soccer matches every night on our room TV, or on the big screen in the pub if we wanted.

In the 2 spa sessions we had, we were steamed, skinned, tenderized, basted, marinated and boiled with flowers.

We shopped and we ate... what more could we have asked for on a vacation?

And in any case, we hadn't intended to bring much rupiah back anyway. And we didn't. Mission accomplished!

Got away from it all those past few days with no computer and no Internet. And, strangely enough, no withdrawal symptoms either. I was vacationing in Bali, and though I said we didn't need a plan, maybe we should have had one anyway.

My impressions of Bali:

The people have one staple diet -- radish & sotong soup. The radishes are usually those just fallen off the radish truck while the sotong are simply blur. And they get eaten for breakfast unless they get smart, fast.

There is an unquiet desperation for the tourist dollar in Bali. hawkers and street vendors are everywhere, all asking to know where you're from, and most try to make civil chit-chat until you realize that they have something to sell -- some decorative nonsense, or the promise of the adventure of a lifetime, or a sight you'll never see again and if you haven't seen it, you haven't been to Bali. Some vendors aren't even that civil; they crowd around you, blocking off all possible polite exits and shove their wares in your face, while undercutting each other 's prices to entice a deal.

It's sad 'cos they destroy what would otherwise be a scene of breathtaking beauty. For example, the rice terrace and the view of Lake Batur that our cab stopped at on our day-tour we couldn't wait to leave because of the vendors who effectively cut off the scenery while they surrounded us. It's even sadder that there doesn't seem to be anything else they could be doing to make a decent living.

Most of the attractions, even public parks, require some entrance fee and even the ancient Besakih temples required a donation (US$7 per pax recommended) for a guided tour.

Some vendors go so far as to simply be plain dishonest, like the lady who insisted I buy a sarong or I wouldn't be allowed to visit the temple. So, sotong that I was, I bought the sarong she wrapped around my waist at a price that would have allowed her to retire after lunch. It turned out that as long as I wore jeans (which I was wearing at the time) I would have had no conflict with the dress code anyway.

There was this little kid at the Besakih temple who placed a small flower on June's pouch and refused to take it back. He kept chanting, "gimme money" repeatedly and kept following us until our guide advised us to put the flower on the ground and walk on.

Then there was this jolly cab driver whom we engaged to take us from Kuta to our hotel in Benoa. He engaged us in loud conversation and offered to show us where we could see a beautiful sunset "near our hotel" so we said, "ok," as long as it was on the way. It wasn't, and we had to pay an entrance fee to go in, and the cab driver encouraged us to go explore and take photos, though it was nowhere near sunset yet. And he kept his meter running all the while. AND as we were still unfamiliar with the denominations of Indonesian currency then, we seriously overpaid him his fare and he didn't return any change to us. This we discovered only on hindsight when June suddenly wondered why she was so short of cash.

These people really got fat on June the radish and me the sotong, but these experiences hardened our hearts to all street vendors and cab drivers from then on. We said, "no," a lot, and many times we didn't see anybody, we didn't hear anybody and we just kept walking. June made it a point to bargain for everything and we faithfully counted our money and our change till it became a little embarrassing.

And, no, we weren't impressed with the local food either. The decent places to eat were just as expensive as fast food, the menu items didn't seem to offer much variety; and the cheap places to eat would have qualified for a stunt on "Fear Factor." No thanks.

The really sad thing is, we didn't mind spending more on established businesses and multinationals. We couldn't bargain these rates but we happily forked over our hard-earned savings to them anyway. I guess if there's a product or service we want, we're the type to go get it without the provider's effort. But if there's something offered to us that we don't want, no amount of persuasion is going to make us feel good about paying for it. And so our tourist dollar still goes into the hands of the corporations, and away from the hands of the locals whom we were there to "help out" in the first place.

I have photos, of course. A whopping 80+ I've uploaded that mostly tell the tale of our travels. The slideshow takes a while to load, so please be patient. Click.

Bali beckons. Departing on a Valuair flight in the late afternoon, arriving at a destination neither of us know anything about, apart from a quick flip through a travel guide or two. No plan, just our flight schedule and hotel bookings, no idea what we're going to be doing once we get there. Actually, that's all the plan we need. We're on vacation!

JY's mom's wake was in the void deck of her HDB block. By her tradition, JY couldn't leave the area while the wake was in session, because the immediate family of the deceased had to keep replacing the big joss stick whenever it looked close to burning out. This meant that JY spent 2 nights straight in the void deck, only taking a couple of hours break in between to rest.

June and I joined her late last night to keep her spirits up. We brought the 'X-men' Monopoly set that June had bought for me a couple of birthdays ago, along with other games and reading materials in preparation for a long night.

It was the first opportunity to tear open the Monopoly set, and the 3 of us enjoyed a silly, not completely by-the-rules game all the way till about 0400 hrs this morning. By then, we were all drained so JY went to sleep in her uncle's car which he had kindly parked just in front of the void deck, and we went home.

We rejoined her at about noon for the procession to the crematorium. There was a simple cermony for the closing of the casket, during which JY had to focus on her mom instead of on her guests and well-wishers, and... well, it was clear she missed her mom a lot.

It was the same at the crematorium. The ceremony seemd designed to alternate between procedure -- routine behaviourial response -- and moments of silence and stillness for reflection and personal emotional response. The balance between the 2 responses helps the bereaved deal with the loss and brings closure at the same time.

JY, you've had a really trying ordeal to get through and you've had to be strong all the way. We won't be around next week, we'll be in Bali, but you have no shortage of friends who will be there for you. Hope you get some rest soon, and try to enjoy what's left of your vacation. Let's go 'blading again soon, ok?

Cashing in on World Cup fever is the Swiss tourism board which is targetting female tourists while their men obsess over the competition. Check out the latest TV commercial here.

The voice-over goes: "Dear girls, why not escape during the summer's World Cup... to a country where men spend less time on football... and more time on you!" Notice what the beefy Swiss dude is doing by the time the voice mentions, "you," and you can see how he wants to spend time with you.

Must be a version of Swiss humour, or the ad agency deserves a good talking-to.

JY's mom finally succumbed to the ravages of the Big 'C' this morning. We knew of her illness for several months now, and JY herself has been very strong about it. Even today she's been going about making sure to get the procedures right for the final send-off on Sunday. She's been busy making arrangements with the relevant authorities and welcoming and entertaining her visitors who've come to pay their last respects.

We haven't been able to actually sit and ask her how she feels about the whole thing, though. She's been treating it very matter-of-fact for the moment, as if she's nothing more than just a part of the entire process. It's a coping strategy that seems to be working for her. Guess she'll also be glad to know she has friends who'll support her through this rough patch.

Meantime, if anyone wants to leave JY a message of sympathy, especially if you know her, just drop a comment and I'll pass it on. Or better yet, if you know how to contact her directly, please do.

The hard part about being on vacation is that by now, pretty much everyone I know has skipped town already while I'm still waiting for my turn to go. And now that June works till late at night, that means that I'm left to my own devices for most of the day. And I'm beginning to get a taste of what retirement is like, after all.

There's a lot to prepare for, considering that there will come a time when we can't work any more. It's not just the financial part, there's also the sense that there isn't much else we can do that will mean anything more to anyone. Physically, mentally, it all just falls apart on us until 3, 2, 1, time's up.

Financially, we prepare ourselves through our insurance policies, investment plans and our savings; but most of us don't think beyond our day-to-day employment. We give of ourselves to our jobs and our companies thinking that's all the time we have in our daily allotted 24 hours, but we forget that regardless of how faithful and loyal we are to our jobs, our employers are under no obligation to be as faithful to us in return. After all, the Company has a longer life expectancy then we do, so all the faster it will replace us when we can't keep up.

When our jobs are taken away from us, we're seriously lost. After all, that's all we've ever lived for over the past few decades of our lives. Suddenly, we have time on our hands, and though that may seem like a luxury to us busy working people today, it's only because no one has time for us any more. Their lives still go on, and our's just become irrelevant, being no longer in the same context.

It doesn't have to be this way, though. The office is just one place to build social contacts, but it has a time limit. There are other places that we can build other social bridges that don't have time limits: family, for example. We can also nurture and develop other interests besides what's immediately relevant to whatever's keeping us busy, whether it's studies or career. And don't feel guilty that it's a "waste of time" because though a career will grind to a halt one day, our lives shouldn't have to.

I'm especially vulnerable to retirement irrelevance because it suddenly dawned on me that I'll be reaching retirement age at least 10 years earlier than the folks I hang out with. So in case anyone asks why I don't give 110% to my job like everyone else in the working world does, I just have the Bigger Picture in mind.

What I said about Onimusha 3, I take back. Sometimes, you have to put the manual aside and play the game for yourself. There's a bit of a learning curve, but tutorials are built into the game itself. Playing on a keyboard is quite unwieldy, but you can't go too far wrong on a hack-and-slash RPG lite.

The game has cinematic ambitions, employing Jap heartthrob, Takeshi Kaneshiro and French action movie star, Jean Reno, as the 2 main characters the player controls. The plot is one heck of a mess involving Samurai, demonic time-travel experiments and French special forces. Disregarding all theories of time-paradoxes, the 2 heroes trade places in time and despite the 500-year difference between them, have to cooperate with each other somehow to get time sorted out again, and go home.

O3 is a more arcade style RPG, rewarding fast reflexes over problem solving. There are several in-game puzzles that hold some useful items, but the more fun thing is mastering the "Critical" moves -- 1-hit kills that can chain together in a mass slaughter of enemies, releasing the most number of "souls" that you can use to heal, upgrade weapons and armour, invoke special magical attacks, or become invincible for a short period of time.

So it's beat up on monsters, upgrade, and beat up the next boss all the way till the end. Some bosses are quite tough, so I've learned to close in, block, hit, RUN AWAY, heal (if necessary) repeat until they die. If only I could learn to time my "Criticals" better... my current technique is so inefficient, unglam even.

And as Capcom is wont to do, there are mini-games and new costumes (like Samurai Sam's silly-looking cowboy outfit) to unlock just to encourage replaying the game once you've finished it.

Grand, cinematic scale in-game movies though the script is quite cliched -- cringeworthy sometimes -- but this is one game that keeps throwing surprises at the player, and that keeps the fun factor up.

Not often we staff get to glam up. JY's on MC duty tonight for Chewy's wedding dinner. 

June and the blushing bride, Chewy. 

I've been a good boy and not picked up any new traffic offences for a straight 365 days! As of today, my horrendous 13 DIPs have been erased, the slate has been wiped clean and all is forgiven!

Let's not have to live through that ever again! Drive safely, folks!

Heaven is waking up from a good, long sleep. The sun is bright outside, but inside the room is a shade of rose-pink-peach reflecting the colour of the walls and the curtains that diffuse the heat and glare of the outside world.

Next to me, June is still asleep, nestled amongst her cat-shaped cushions. In between us, Q-tip has just roused and is looking up expectantly, hoping for an outing soon. She offers up her tummy for a rub, her tongue hanging out appreciatively as I indulge her.

Around us, Momo and Kaiser are at play, jumping on and off the bed in pusuit of each other to avenge a bite or a scratch, though neither can remember who started it first.

And it's a Saturday, in the midst of a long vacation. No agenda, no worries.

Aaaaaahhhhh....!

Oh my head... I haven't slept in the last 40 hours. Every year around this time I will invariably do something stupid and make a mess of Watson's systems.

Yesterday began promisingly enough with a nice, informal remedial GP session in college. In the afternoon I decided to go check out my old haunt, Sim Lim Square. If there wasn't a game I could pick up from there, then my quest would truly be hopeless.

I picked up "Onimusha 3," a console port, though as I began reading the manual, it was almost with instant regret. The controls on the keyboard look like a nightmare to operate. Different combinations of keys held down produce different effects or movements, but what they actually do I can't qute figure out from the poorly translated instructions. For instance, under "Basic Attacks" we get "It becomes 'Care' while CTRL is being pushed. At this time, it becomes an axis movement to the enemy unit, it enjoys the enemy's back, and it can enjoy "Advanced play"...' Huh? So I haven't installed the game yet 'cos I'm still busy scratching my head over the manual.

How I messed up Watson is a different story. At Sim Lim, I also thought it would be a good idea to invest in a video-capture card so I wouldn't have to depend on the mercies of the hypertension inducing Pentium II in Com Lab 1 any longer.

Video-capture requires a lot of hard-drive space so I happily formatted an unused partition on my c: drive. "Format" instruction (usually) = disaster. My mistake was simultaneously running other applications while the drive was still in being Formatted. Windows crashed, never to be restarted again. June said she didn't know whether to pity me or whether I deserve my disasters. Thanks.

So yesterday turned out to be more expensive than I thought. I ran out to buy a new hard-drive for a fresh, clean install of Win XP. With the new drive, I was able to recover my valuable, sensitive files from the crashed drive, so thankfully I didn't lose too much this time.

From last night till now, it's been a tedious, repetitive task of loading and configuring all my programs the way I want in the new c: drive. What fun. Yay.

It was quite an experience returning to CSC in the afternoon for bowling with Amy. Some girls' school team occupied more than a quarter of the lanes. I couldn't tell if they were there to train their motor-skills or their vocal cords. The entire alley was bursting with their incessant cheering, sometimes coordinated and sometimes not. If this is how they are when they're just training, I feel sorry for their opponents in actual competition.

Sharing the next lane to us was a senior citizen. He was friendly enough to give Amy more tips to improve her technique, but he was a little disappointed at our stamina. We only lasted 5 straight games while he was ready to quit only after his 13th.

Wonder if that's the kind of retirement I'm looking forward to? Nothing to do but bowl the afternoon away. I like bowling, but I don't think I like it that much. And oddly enough, I really don't think I could face the prospect of living out my retirement alone. Maybe I'm not tired enough yet to appreciate being re-tired?

Actually, we quit to go watch "Over the Hedge" with HP and Vince. A very clever movie, I thought, about the conflicting drives a society has in a modern, high-tech world. Modern, urban living has its great promises of a more convenient lifestyle. Mostly, it has to do with having the ability to accumulate food without effort, to eat whatever we want, whenever we feel like it, and still be able to leave a mountain of waste behind after we're done.

To the people who actually need to work to eke out a hand-to-mouth existence, urban living promises an unimaginable paradise. But the cost of such a lifestyle is high: people become selfish, suspicious of each other, use each other for their own personal gains, and ultimately the trust that ties a society together breaks down.

Ooh, ooh... and the NE guy in me also sees in the movie a tiny little community surrounded by 1) neighbours with high fences, and 2) the need to interact with them somehow, 3) with ingenuity, innovation, adaptability, and tenacity in order to survive. And yet, in overcoming the threats and dangers we face, we must never forget that our social bonds and family ties are the only things that make our society hold any meaning for us, whether we succeed or fail.

Oh, btw, the movie was hilarious too, despite all the NE talk. Go watch!

Saw my first (dunno if it'll also be my last) batch of PUS presenters through their presentation this morning. Of the 3 presentations in our grouping, ours by far was the most entertaining. I thought so as I was watching it, and other audience members likewise confirmed it too.

Ours was short, and though we had a serious message, we played it for the laughs anyway. What to do? Ours opened the entire series of Parallel Presentations and it had to set the right tone: lighthearted, fun and not taking ourselves too seriously.

Between video clip and 'live' action on stage we went for seamless transitions, props that actually had a purpose for being, and clear characterization without having to resort to labeling (literally), and without cynical, snide, self-deprecatory asides as if to say, "this is just a piece of theatrical posturing; we're embarrassed to be showing you this." We -- unlike everyone else -- were proud to embarrass ourselves in front of our audience and we got our points across succinctly and got some laughs as well.

Before y'all think I'm looking at the whole thing through rose-tinted glasses, let me say that while we put in a lot of time and effort over the presentation, we could have prepared Mich and Yogs better for the Q&A. They were so tense and uncomfortable trying to field their questions, but clearly their stage fright got the better of them in this totally unrehearsed section. They're good at impov comedy but improv serious takes bit more preparation.

But well done to our team on the whole, video and 'live' presenters alike, for being not boring; for being yourselves on-stage and off; and for all the silly, mad ideas that didn't need a lot of discussion over but just freely offered to anyone who would run with them and see them though to their logical end. Your presentation should be a memorable one for your audience :)

Late afternoon returned to ECP to cycle with Amy and HP. Didn't stay long 'cos I abandoned them to fetch June for our dinner appointment. It was at the Delhi Restaurant, a tandoori place on Race Course Road. Organized by Jo and Aggie, our dinner company also included Lucy, Vince, NBS and Ron. Food was cheap and plentiful and tasty though not spicy (though the tandoori mixed-grill flambe was spectacular); the service was attentive; and the company was stimulating. A nice, agenda-less evening.

Took our drinks at the prata place at Rosyth.

So much to do despite the vacation. Yay!

Finally, the 1st day of PUS arrives. Our motley crew prepares to invade PGP residences. 

Awaiting processing in AC comfort 

The check-in counter, where Mel and I bid our children farewell and assured them they were in good hands. They grow up so fast...!

Having abandoned our charges, Mel introduced me to Edward, the Western Food operator at the Business canteen. Y'all at Kent Ridge should know what I'm talking about, ya? We ordered 2 lemon fish with pasta/mash and split a cheese-pork wurst. Lunchtime must have been over for quite a while, judging by the empty tables and how cold the fusilli was. But Edward's brownie was excellent, warm and fluffy from the microwave with hot Hershey's chocolate sauce on top. Dying to try his apple pie next time.

Perfect summer weather in the afternoon. Went 'blading on ECP like I've wanted to for so long. Tried adding on my newly discovered track to my existing one. That would have taken me from the East Coast SAFRA Resort to Fort Road and back.

Cannot make it. Nearly died, not from lack of CV endurance but from lactic acid poisoning. My legs were so badly cramped by the time I got past the McD's I had to take frequent rest stops to get my legs responsive again. Then they'd carry me another short distance before I had to stop for another break. It didn't help that when I tried stretching one muscle to relieve the pain, another would immediately cramp up, so it was just a string of agonized cries and curses while I sat and tried to get my legs in working order again and again and again.

Gave up by the time I hit the lifeguard tower west of the McD's and doubled back stiff-legged back to M2. I had parked at the lot just east of the food centre. It was a long and painful journey back.

Well, we can always try for cycling tomorrow.

I was complaining to June about the lack of PC games available in the stores these days. Or rather, the lack of titles I was interested in. It's funny that back when I didn't have any money, I wanted to buy the whole shelf. Today, with some measure of spending power, I'm just staring at the shelf, eyes glazed.

What's on the shelf these days? Let's see... shoot-em-ups and wargames in 1st person and 3rd; the Sims and its myriad expansion packs; driving games (some allowing shootouts between cars); Myst spinoffs and knockoffs; and some budget puzzlers and re-releases for the nostalgic. Been there done that.

Wonder if my tastes have changed, or if there really isn't anything new out there any more?

Disappointed, I did some surfing and found a couple of things that managed to amuse me for a while. Zuma from Shockwave, a match-the-coloured-balls-and-make-them-disappear-before-they-overwhelm-you game with an Aztec theme can be played for free online. It offers some quick-thinking action, though the online version tends to be limited and repetitve after a while.

I also found a little treasure (subjectively speaking). AGD Interactive appears to have taken over the license of the original "King's Quest" series. They've remade this antique -- no make that "pioneering" -- graphic adventure game and re-released KQ1 and KQ2 in VGA format. For you whippersnappers out there, that means moving sprites on flat background only and no system-sucking 3D polygonal whizz-bang-crash nonsense. They've even added in a music track and a speech pack to make the games more up-to-date, say c.1995.

I'm not saying games of the past were "better" than they are now. Graham, our avatar, is seriously lacking in intelligence and pathfinding ability. He walks off ledges, cliffs, beanstalks; drowns and gets crushed by falling rocks all too easily, which means we have to baby-step him through the more dangerous environments to prevent a reload scenario. I was clicking and yawning my way through KQ1 yesterday and I'm still only about halfway thorough. But if I was going to be bored anyway, I might as well be bored for free.

... I'm getting old.

Edit 01

Today, 2 dogs, and a chance to hit Tanjong Beach. Unfortunately, 2 humans got an attack of the lazies and inadvertently fell asleep in front of the TV just after lunch. Fortunately, while we slept, the afternoon rains came again, so our beach trip would have been a washout anyway if we had made it.

What we did accomplish was a cursory exploration of the Pet Resort in Seletar Farmway. We need to find a nice place to board Q-tip when we go to Bali in a couple of weeks' time, and we thought maybe a change from her usual would be nice.

Just off Jalan Kayu, the Pet Resort looks like a farm from the outside. Inside, there is quite a bit of space for the different animal enclosures. Here, there are goats, ponies, a flock of weird-looking birds with what looks like a spray of fireworks on their heads, a flock of huge geese, and 1 awesome stork so large it had an entire enclosure all to itself overlooking a pond. Nice digs. The place is like a petting zoo, except there is a warning not to get too close to Woodstock, the stork. Frankly, he doesn't need the warning sign. If I ever encounter a bird that size in the wild, I'd give it a wide berth. You won't have to tell me twice.

They have puppies and rabbits for sale too. We saw the cutest jack russel on the POS counter, his new owner coughing up well over a grand for him. "His mother's a champion," declared the new owner proudly, and I suddenly thought of the fact that people used to be bought and sold like that too at one time, and in some parts of the world, still are.

What did the dogs think of the place? Q-tip doesn't seem to think much at all. She's just happy to have an outing, doesn't care where. Mimi, however, didn't like it at all. From the time we stepped into the place, Mimi became a portable fuzzy jelly, trembling at 5.1 on the Richter scale. I can only guess that she sensed this place was where owners left their animals, and she was afraid we were thinking of abandoning her there too. Ignorance is bliss, yes, Q-tip?

In the end, June decided this wasn't the place for Q-tip. Most of the boarders are large dogs, the kind that stress Q-tip out just by sniffing her behind. Doubt she'll be very happy having to stay there with them for the better part of a week. So it's back to Dominic's for her after all.

Today's date, 27 May. I looked through my previous 2 entries on this date in '05 and '04 and I just realized that I never did mention the significance of this date before. This was the date of our wedding dinner, held at the Art Museum, way back in 2000.

It was a free-and-easy buffet dinner, a pretty much do-it-yourself affair. With good friends coordinating the deco and proceedings, the only thing we had to worry about was the imminent thunderstorm about to break over our heads, threatening to wash out our OUTDOOR celebration. It all came down to prayer, and lo and behold, (according to our guests) the storm had broken all over the island, except for a tiny patch of clear sky over the Art Museum that evening. Our little wedding miracle.

The 22nd Council whom I invited also experienced a miracle that evening. The Councillors discovered our stash of red wine and they got busy conducting their own, um, communion service. And they were happy.

Wonder why I never mentioned this before?

We're back at the mid-year break again! What can I say? A short break, some unstructured time to myself. Time to rest and recharge, and to figure out my next step now that the JC2s are only half a year away from their 'A's. PUS begins full swing next week and there are still some niggly administrative details to solve -- like where the spare PUS t-shirts are, and what to do about a little boy who "wants to go home" already, even before summer camp starts. Holiday remedials and marking to catch up on, and a new set of holiday assignments to keep me going. Oh, and then there's a trip to Bali to look forward to.

Rambling again. My brain's already packed and gone on vacation... la, la, la...

It's a conspiracy, I tell ya! All week I'd been looking forward to a free afternoon and I got one today, PUS kids deciding to postpone rehearsal in favour of SPA preparation. The plan was to drive out to the East coast and put in some 'blading time along the beach.

It was brilliantly hot and sunny in the morning and it looked like all systems were go! But just as I was about to get into M2 and drive off, the South China Sea picked up and dumped itself on our heads. Ironically, we happened to bring up Murphy's Law in today's KI tutorial. I couldn't have planned a better object lesson.

Free weekday afternoons go either one of two ways. Healthy, as in getting a sweaty cardio-vascular workout in the sun if the weather is good; or if the weather is inclement as it was today, unhealthy, as in sitting on my fat ass, clogging up my arteries with junk food. More often than not this year, it's been the latter option. Presenting today's choice menu:


You guessed it! This isn't the campus cafeteria.

"There is no spoon," but there are, however, a couple of sporks and the remains of my lunch. 

I never thought I'd enjoy PUS much. When I began this year heading up NY conneX and PUS, I thought the former would be a challenge, the latter a chore.

After all, based on what I've observed of PUS in previous years, staff involvement has been focused on doing everything necessary to ensure that the College's presentation doesn't embarrass the College in the midst of all the other Colleges and the VIP in attendance. That's a lot of pressure to be under, and that tends to bring out the control freak in the person-in-charge. No one enjoys working under Hitler, and unless you're an innate fascist, you won't enjoy being Hitler either.

I personally wasn't relishing my turn on the throne this year. Becoming a despot involves too much work for these lazy bones to appreciate. Fortunately, I didn't have to go there. This bunch of PUS kids is the most animated, spontaneous, anarchistic, narcissistic set of students I've ever lost control over, and if anyone asks, they're running the show, not me.

In many ways, 'rol is at the core of our presentation. It was his vision that developed into the video shoot everyone ad-libbed their way through. No script, just a rough briefing, a couple of walk-through rehearsals, 2-3 takes in our 5-shot sequence, and that's a wrap in a 3-hour weekend shoot. Joining him on the presentation team are Mich and Shin, and that's it -- our comedy trio.

While the video forms the frame, our presentation is 'live' on stage and it's the 3 of them that carry our assigned topic -- how to make traditional businesses viable and relevant in the new knowledge and research intensive economy -- to our audience. The 3 of them together are a riot to watch as they improv their way through their rehearsals.

'rol and Mich play a couple of KBE savvy bimbos advising a manic depressive, slightly suicidal kaya toast seller (Shin) how to update his business in a presentation we call, "My Business is Toast!" Even today, during the preview presentation at Assembly period for the JC1s, the 3 were still doing improv on stage!

The 3 of them are a Dictator's nightmare, but I'm truly grateful that they are a bunch of kids willing to constantly put themselves on the line, constantly trying out fresh ideas regardless of how many times Mel and I have to tell them, "cut back/stoppit/NOOooo!"

I'm also grateful that my co-staff, Mel and Gerald aren't control freaks either. We're just waching our version of PUS take shape almost all by itself. This year, PUS really belongs to our kids, and that's something for them to be proud of.

Momo, my cat, can think inductively.

Inductive reasoning refers to the ability to predict an event through the repeated observation that under certain conditions the same event has occurred before, and therefore under the same conditions the event will happen again.

Momo has this irritating habit of following me out of the house when I leave for work in the morning. She loves to run out into the corridor and sprawl on the cement floor, rubbing her body on it for a couple of seconds (so embarrasing), and then running off to another spot where she repeats this silly behaviour. Eventually, I'll catch up to her and carry her back into the house, and she's contented.

Lately, Kaiser has noticed her behaviour and he's looking like he wants to copy what "big sister" is doing. I cannot handle 2 cats running around in my corridor unsupervised, so I prevent them both from going out, much to Momo's disappointment. This has happened several times already.

These last couple of days, when Momo sees Kaiser walking towards the front door where she's sitting waiting for me to open it, Momo makes an annoyed noise and stalks off back towards the kitchen to finish her breakfast. She doesn't even wait for him to come near the door any more, she just gives up. Poor girl.

Guess I shouldn't be surprised at Momo's intellectual prowess. Pavlov proved that dogs think inductively too.

'blading again at Bish Park since... a long time ago, it seems. Only JY joining us today, but it was a pretty rushed 2 rounds before we had to part company. JY had her personal affairs to take care of, and June and a few of her colleagues wanted to drop in on another colleague of theirs who's feeling lousy this week.

June and I went to Toa Payoh in search of a stall that sells Japanese seaweed. It's supposed to be incredibly packed with vitamins and other health enhancing goodies, for a pretty good price too. We found the stall at the end of the Hub, near the POSB ATMs.

The vendor let us sample different recipes he concocted: 2 different varieties of seaweed in sesame oil, garlic, sliced chilli, can't remember what else. Despite my prejudices, it tasted quite good. Except I thought he had let his sample soak too long in the oil and it had got a bit soggy.

June. bought. a lot. of. seaweed. Fortunately, it wasn't all meant for us, but her colleagues as well.

We collected June's colleagues at the MRT station and I deposited them at their sickly colleagues' block. I declined to accompany them upstairs, taking the opportunity to sit in the quiet void deck and actually try to get some marking done. It felt a little anti-social doing that, but, y'know... marking.

Began Saturday bright and early at NUS for the PUS on-site presentation rehearsal. After a general briefing for all participants, the LT space was ours to have a quick run-through of our script and tech, but it was difficult getting started because of several briefings going on at the same time for various aspects of AV and furniture arrangements. Of course, nothing could get started until 1 particular college finished a completely irrelevant briefing of its participants right in the middle of the presentation floor, which I thought was quite inconsiderate, especially when everyone is already pressed for time.

Our presenters looked nervous and didn't quite know where to stand as there was this huge console counter occupying centre-stage instead of an empty space, like as we rehearsed in college. In fact, this dumb object took up so much space, a lot of the movements we devised have to be re-looked, re-thought, and re-designed. Basically, I was counting on getting a stage with wings. What I got was a narrow strip of floor space for my presenters to stand in...

I realize I'm starting to talk nonsense here. It's almost 24 hours since I wrote that last paragraph. What happened was that I saved this entry, then went into the living room where I found June asleep on the carpet. I was too tired myself to wake her so we both spent the night on the living room floor.

What else I meant to add to this entry was that we had College Day in the afternoon with P giving his first ever College Day speech, and how serious he sounded. Not quite his usual off-the-cuff humour as he was so conscious of being formal in front of his Board and his predecessor.

As soon as was humanly possible, a small party of us made a bee-line for Thai Express, J8, for a quick meal before our screening of "The DaVinci Code." It's worth a review, but not today. Still not feeling all that coherent. :P

Squaresoft recently released a DVD movie following up on the characters that featured in Final Fantasy VII. "Advent Children" was an impulse buy for me, though my expectations weren't really high for it. After all, a 101 minute CGI movie wasn't going to recapture the blood and sweat and magic of the epic game FF7 was.

My instinct about "Advent Children" wasn't wrong. It was mildly interesting to give some limelight to Reno and Rude of the Turks -- the Turks were quite amusing adversaries in the game -- but the movie doesn't really develop the story of Cloud and company much further though 2 years have passed since their adventures in Crater.

In this movie sequel, there is an epidemic sweeping through the city of Midgar. Cloud himself has become infected, though he doesn't want his friends to know about it. What's worse is the rise of 3 Cloud-clones who seek the resurrection of uber-bad guy, Sephiroth, whom they think will lead them in their quest for world domination or whatever.

It was disappointing that the main characters -- all 7 of whom had rich backstories in the game -- are relegated to simply playing muscle in this movie. The gang shows up for the final punch-up, but it's mainly Tifa that reaches out to Cloud on a personal level while the others just keep monsters off his back.

Without the interactivity of the game interface, without the time taken to flesh out the characters, without the ability to make wacky combinations of "materia" just to see their effects on enemies, the FF7 player just sits and drools watching the events of "Advent Children" unfold, rather than being involved in the process of making it happen. The movie experience thus pales in comparison to the game. Bleh.

Still, the video footage from the movie has become rich material for spawning parodies of itself. Check out YouTube for a bunch of FF7 silliness. You might start with this one, entitled, "The Real Story."

NY conneX is now updated every Thursday. Issue #14 is ready for public perusal: click here. We've got a diverse lot of articles this week, from our exploits at Makan Mania, to touch rugby, to a review on the goings-on at this year's E3 in Los Angeles.

Now that the publication can more or less take care of itself, I can now free myself up to focus more on increasing our readership. Where else but in the Education industry can a guy hold a Chief Publisher job for 6 months then immediately switch hats and become Publicity Head for the next 6? There's never a dull moment...

Looks like our creative Mr Sim is really going ahead with the plan to halt Apple's i-pod sales via litigation. How Singaporean is that? If we can't compete on a level playing field, we claim the other guy's cheating, take him to court, hope that we have more resources than he does to survive a long-drawn out and expensive process, eventually bankrupt the guy, and Game Over! We win!

This strategy has been decisively effective against our opponents before: certain individuals who are generally unloved by the public, and, in some cases, are even an embarassment to be associated with in public.

ST's editorial cartoonist depicted Creative's foray as an intrepid David facing off against a formidable Goliath. Right.

Goliath, as the Bible portrayed him, was a yutz who deserved what he got from the shrimp. What Creative is contending with is quite a different animal. Apple-heads have reason to love their Macs, and for better or worse,podders love their pods. Apple is more than just a company to be taken down; for many of us, it a culture and a way of life.

And, yes, though Creative is a Singaporean home-grown model of entrepreneurhood we bow down to and worship, lots of Singaporeans ourselves have spurned the Zen for the pod. Perhaps we are irrational to do so, but "cool" is something we'll pay for once we can afford it.

The court battle isn't about pod sales here, though. The suit seeks to halt pod sales in the US itself -- Apple home turf!

Inasmuch as Goliath was unwelcome on David's backyard, David himself would have been just as obnoxious if he walked through Goliath's front door, totting his home-made uzi and gunning for a head shot.

In short, I doubt Creative would please anyone in this rather un-creative adventure. But I take my hat off to Sim and his organization for their audacity.

Wonder if it's getting to the end of term or if the mid-year exams are fast approaching that's affecting our J2s.

Thought I'd put 'em in groups and toss 'em the daily 'paper and let each group select a few of their favourite stories. They would then work on a presentation of their selected stories in TV news format. By this, I mean they would have to script out the news cast, imagine and compose the accompanying video visuals and play out the human drama that lies behind every news story. Sounds exciting, at least on paper.

Of course, the enthusiasm the J2s have greeted this tutorial format has been breathtakingly underwhelming. Work-to-rule and doing-for-the-sake-of-doing have become the work ethic of the day and, frankly, it's tiresome. They aren't entertained, and neither am I by what they produce. Like radioactive green nasi lemak, I guess there is such a thing as being too innovative.

No more fooling around, then. It's back to good, old-fashioned drill-and-practice for them. For some strange reason, I seem to get more productive work output from them this way.

Oh, and on an unrelated note...

Today is a significant date for NY conneX. The faithful old guard have convened for their last major decision: which of the J1s will replace them when they step down next week. It took till about 1930 hrs to complete the interviews and to trash out the options available, but the decision has finally been made. As of this week's issue (available by Thursday), we can hang out a sign declaring, "Under New Management."

What are we staff doing on campus early on a Saturday morning this long weekend?

We're competitors in a Library-organized checkpoint-to-checkpoint race, a.k.a., "Makan Mania 06." Objective: to eat our way through different kinds of food at each checkpoint. The difficulty is that while we select the food items ourselves, the last letter making up the name of the previous food item must begin the name of the next food item. A further complication is that each food item has to conform to a specific restriction set at the checkpoint.

These rules already sound quite complex. There's more. Each checkpoint puts either an individual team member or the whole team in a challenge to complete for a cumulative total of points; and there's a scavenger hunt challenge for even more points.

Perhaps it's simpler to just track our progress (or just check out our pix for a summary):

Checkpoint 2: Serangoon Central
Food item: Char kway teoW
Challenge: Bean counting game (Amy)
Restriction: Halal

Checkpoint 3: Chinatown Complex
Roadblock: Charades of food item names (June)
Food item: Water chestnut drinK (from a Halal kopi stall)
Challenge: Drink 2 bowls of sesame seed paste (June -- despite it being a team challenge)
Restriction: Crispy

Checkpoint 4: Maxwell Road Market
Food item: Kaya toasT
Challenge: a makeshift bagatelle game (Team)
Restriction: liquid and sour

Checkpoint 5: Golden Shoe Complex
Food item: Tom yum noodleS
Challenge: throw darts for points (Xmac) (Failed)
Penalty: eat 5 chili padi (arrrrghhh!)
Restriction: at least 4 colours

Checkpoint 6: Beancurd shop on Short Street
Food item: SkittleS (TM)
Challenge: finish 4 bowls of beancurd (Team)
Restriction: bitter and sweet

Checkpoint 7: Tekka Market
Food item: Schweppes bitter lemoN (TM)
Challenge: sell 8 cups of teh tarik at 50 cents each (Team)
Restriction: nil, but must bridge food item with final food item: Kaya fondue

Final checkpoint: Makansutra, Esplanade
Bridging item: Nasi LemaK
Challenge: identify mystery food item (Amy, June)
Penalty: or eat it (Xmac, HP) (blech!)
Bang gong to end race!

Our team was the first team to arrive, apparently smashing all previous records by at least 2 hours. Congrats, to us! We make a great team!

It's the Vesak Day public holiday! This is probably the best view to have on a Friday afternoon. 

Sentosa's Palawan Beach is popular with dog owners. Mimi's quite at home here. 

We think Q-tip doesn't really like swimming. She just does it for the exercise. 

Q-tip gets the comfortable spot to nap on the beach.

All this, and in the evening June and I caught MI:3 too! It was loud, cinema making full use of the digital stereo equipment to maximize our money's worth. Likewise, the air-con: froze my butt off watching the movie, and as NBS will testify -- if I say it's cold, it IS cold.

Isn't Kaiser aptly named? He looks like a little fascist here. 

Must remember I owe the GFC drinks uncle $3.70. With less than an hour to spare for lunch, NBS and I made a dash for GFC, completely forgetting to bring money with us. We had to make do with the small change in our pockets to pay for my wonton noodles, but her fan choy and our drinks had to go on our tab.

Good thing we're regular customers.

Spent Wednesday afternoon at a general briefing for all PUS participants, and a rehearsal for our presentation team at our host's homeground. Our presentation is still pretty raw, and lots more need to be done in refining our script and movement so that it looks less static.

I've never had any PUS experience before, so I don't really know how our approach to the presentation is going to be received. Not that there isn't substance in what we're going to say, it's that our delivery is bimbotic, playing for laughs rather than serious-but-boring.

But what I'm most proud of our total PUS effort this year is that it's been mostly student-driven. They came up with their own ideas and research for the written report; it was their idea to shoot the presentation video (and develop the content therein). All we staff did -- well, Gerald did spend quite some time and effort guiding the research team along -- was in mainly making their vision happen, and the necessary admin which I sort of muddled through. Still muddling...

I've always thought the PUS was supposed to be done by students for students. Regardless of what other colleges may be doing, I intend to be true to the spirit of PUS.

Spent Tuesday afternoon in the company of fellow teaching staff from the various colleges. We had been gathered to give feedback to our employer (via an impartial third party observer from the private sector) about how things are on the frontlines, and what the Ministry can do to help make it better for us.

There were lots of vocally charged women seated around me. Apart from myself, there were only another 2 guys, and they both left the talking to me. Not sure what I can divulge from our discussions other than that we had quite a cathartic trashing-it-out session amongst ourselves.

But through our brutally honest exchanges I sort of got the feeling that most staff unhappiness seems to come from the individual institution's culture and protocols. There were only a couple of major issues that all of us experienced in common, but most other peeves seem endemic only within our own personal environments.

I'm cynical enough to know that whatever upstairs thinks will benefit us bottom-feeders, by the time it trickles down to us, the idea would have morphed into something quite different, and more often than not means more work for us. For example, when our Boss said teachers would get more time (para 20) for personal development, what we got was an hour scheduled into our timetables for a weekly "sharing session" by fellow staff on topics that needed to be approved for relevance to our teaching subjects.

The formality of these sharing sessiosn makes them limited in effectiveness. We would have got more problems surfacing, more ideas thrown about, more collaborative planning of activities, and a more conducive working environment if they had just given us a common slot on our timetable (which they have) just to hang out with fellow staff, drink coffee and yak agenda-less (which they haven't). Better still, if the timeslot was, say, just before lunchtime on a day we didn't have to return for classes so that we could spend the rest of the afternoon doing fun stuff with each other too.

But of course, people are just going to see this interpretation as 'wasting taxpayers' money' because none of this can be counted as 'work.' After all, we're not paid to have fun, are we?

I am about to take a sledgehammer to the clunky old Pentium II that I'm using to edit the PUS video clip. I've got about 20 minutes of raw footage that I want to extract just less than 5 minutes from. It should be an easy matter to do a simple copy-and-paste job, but nearly every step of the way the PC hangs and I have to start all over again and again and again...

Even when I save what few edits I've made, the save process is itself touch-and-go. I'm never certain if the save is going to be successful after several minutes of hard-drive grinding, or result in yet another occasion to hit ctrl-alt-del.

The sum total of practically a full day's tedium: I got my 200Mb 5 minute edited footage done. I'd stuff the whole lot onto my thumb-drive, but the terminal is running on Win 98(!) which doesn't recognize my new(?) hardware. The terminal doesn't even have networking! So I finally got it burned onto a CD-ROM. Playback from the disk is brilliant: I got sound, no picture. -__-

It's enough to tear the few strands of hair I still have out. I've fantasized flinging my headphones at the monitor to make it work faster, but there were kids present in the com lab, and that kind of behaviour isn't exactly good role modelling, is it?

A day for dark, violent thoughts.

PUS shoot this morning was just grand! I had a cooperative, enthu cast and crew taking scenes of a so-called 'traditional' business and its subsequent transformation into a corporate giant :P

Despite the obvious anachronisms, we're hoping the sepia tone will creat the illusion of the not-too distant past, and that the audience will be forgiving...


Ah Seng's roadside stall c.1960

The new Ah Seng International Kaya Toast flagship outlet

What's a shoot without an accompanying 'making-of' video? 

DoP at work, getting his shot the way he wants 

If there's one thing this General Election has proven, it's that Singaporeans do not like change. Sure, everything changes around us: prices go up, buildings come down, policies cycle, the economy steamrolls on... but as long as we have a choice, we choose not to rock the boat.

As it was when Parliament dissolved this year, our governing authority today is back to status quo. The Ruling Party has all but the same 2 parliamentary seats, the 2 split between the same entrenched Opposition politicians that sat there just 14 days ago.

The Ruling Party may be autocratic, automatic, arrogant, above-all (and that's just the 'A's) but as far as we Singaporeans know, it's a formula that works, and we're not about to change a winning formula, are we?

Yes, the popular vote has risen quite a bit for the Opposition this time, but this only goes to show how adamant we are that our incumbent Opposition remain where they are, as they have been for years, and not lose out in a closely called face-off. We're not taking that chance.

In a world that is madly changing around us, Singaporeans are only too happy to grab onto something that they can ensure won't change, and that is how we are governed, warts and all. Heh, Democracy.

So nice! A reunion of sorts for 3 generations of NYeDC during tonight's run of "Five Foot Way.":


Cast and crew, "The Odyssey," 2004

Cast of "Oz," 2005 

Cast and crew, "Five Foot Way," 2006. 

NYeDC's Drama Night 06 was a generally tight script. Mel primarily wrote "Five Foot Way" as our SYF piece this year, meaning it was actually meant for about a half hour run. Drama Night usually runs a full hour, though, so tonight's script was an extended version, so to speak.

Set along a row of shophouses sometime in the 1960s, it focused on the friendship between 2 boys, 1 Malay and 1 Chinese, during the time of ethnic violence in our history. Despite the focus, the play was still mainly ensemble driven with everyone making the street come alive: Mrs Ang's kopi tiam all hustle and bustle, Sanjeev's bookstore and Cik Zu's mee rebus stall calm and easygoing.

I like the script for its local flavour, colloquialisms and all. Despite the heavy handed censorship from the SYF organizers the dialogue was still essentially recognizable street talk.

The cast was engaging, each character portrayed quite strongly, though certain stereotypes were hard to avoid. Fran, who played the beng went a little ott, looking for laughs that dulled his menacing quality a touch. 'deep played Sanjeev too conservatively, as did Zu; there were times the mike couldn't pick up their voices audibly enough. 'tilda's Geok is the most lighthearted character so she might have concentrated more on her innocence and fun-loving nature and less on being 8 years old.

Dory played Mrs Ang with lots of spit and bile, and it was nice that there was some attempt to explain her bigotted attitude, though it was just a throwaway line that the audience might have easily missed.

Des and 'mir work well together, both balancing each other nicely. Des' morose straight-man and 'mir's happy-go-lucky wiseass have the potential to be a great comedy couple, if they want to explore the pairing further.

Still, being an extended script, there were occasions when the dialogue got flabby and uncertain. Too many last minute changes that don't get rehearsed adequately will do that. The fight sequences were still rushed and the ending scene was strange because 2 characters are talking about a third character as if she wasn't there, and yet she is obviously sitting there in their plain view.

With the stage set and costumes and lighting and more rehearsals, tonight's production was a great improvement from when I previewed it last week. Some tweaks are going to be necessary to get it ready for the SYF, but not too many.

This week has been running up to this morning's General Elections. The papers have been full of campaign goings-on and everyone seems excited about it. Even the students who are usually politically phobic have actually been animatedly talking about it during tutorials. Perhaps for once the democratic process appeared more real, more concrete than just lecture material.

June and I woke up early to cast our votes. Early morning means no crowds. Can't think of anything worse than spending an off day waiting in a long but orderly line guarded by policemen.

Despite all the precautions, there was at least 1 incident of human error at our polling station. After casting our votes, we exited into the parking lot only to be accosted by our elderly neighbour [he called me, "Ah Ti," which was quite gratifying; most people call me, "Uncle," these days] who was looking very puzzled and lost. Apparently, he had followed the wrong group of people and walked straight past the polling area and into the parking lot, still with his blank ballot in hand. June had to take him back inside the station and explain for him what had happened and get it all sorted out. One party or another very nearly lost an important vote there!

PUS presenters want to shoot a video as part of their presentation. We've been storyboarding over a number of afternoons this week, and I'm glad they were sensible enough to cut down the number of scenes we have to shoot.

It's a good opportunity to activate the PUS resource team as well, making this activity the first one to actually give them something concrete to do for a change. Hope everyone got the message, though. Communication somehow isn't our strong suit. We're shooting on Sunday.

Tonight is actually NYeDC's Drama Night 06. Their first production since I left the club. But June had to work late again, so I had to switch tonight's tix for Saturday's instead. Bleh. I wanted to watch the debut performance, but I guess a 24-hour wait won't hurt too badly.

Still adjusting to our new schedules. Both June and I are keeping very late days. Work has just been crazy for her in her new job, quite different from her previous one. I am truly convinced now that dinner for 'normal' people here is at 9pm and that we have been living a blinkered, idyllic and unrealistic existence in the years prior to this one.

Such a schedule means being hungry at unusual times of the day; feeling tired often, having less recovery time these days than before; and sleeping late (I mean LATE) at night trying to squeeze in everything we had been accustomed to doing when we once had the whole evening to ourselves. It's a vicious cycle.

How do other working folks cope? Especially those with kids?

Such fine weather this afternoon. Took most advantage of it by driving out to ECP as soon as humanly possible after classes to rent a bike and get some sweating done. Our staff have begun a Friday morning jog-walk thing for exercise, but I need more space and better scenery to motivate me.

Discovered that where I thought the biking trail ended on the east side, it actually continued via a short detour through the walking track. It led to a part of the beach I'd never been before, and how gorgeous it was! A green grove lining the smooth cycling track, sandy beach and blue sky. Ok, golf course on the landward side with the occasional 747 marking the sky with its jet-trail, but other than that it was quite heavenly. It's a great 'blading track and I can't wait to go back again.

Got back to campus in the late afternoon to give fresh eyes to this year's Drama Night production on Mel's request. I'd been putting it off for a while, actually, knowing that sticking a hand in too early will only confuse the performers who would have had to listen to far too many directors. Today, the most I could help out with was in working out the steps in a couple of fight sequences; though choreographing stage combat isn't really my thing.

Since I was on campus anyway, I brought over my portable DVD viewer and a stack of assorted DVDs to keep the Council staff entertained while they're stuck at their induction camp for the newly elected Councillors over the long weekend. Hope it was enough to keep their morale up.

I got off uncharacteristically early. It's the sense that the major stress points of the week no longer factor on my calendar, and the knowledge that a long weekend is coming up that after classes today I felt I could breathe a little easier. I had some admin to take care of for PUS at SR, then that was pretty much it. I'm on "standby" mode right now, enjoying it while I can. Maybe this weekend I'll take a look at the compre scripts I've accumulated and get round to actually marking them...

NY conneXions Dead-Tree Edition #2 is available from today! Limited stocks only! Get your more environmentally-friendly downloadable version here (.pdf, 1.6Mb)!

2 big headaches have passed as of today. The presentation to the cluster heads is over, and the print version of NY conneX (#2) is in my hands, ready for distribution tomorrow.

If you had ever gone to visit your school's P when you were a kid, it usually meant that you were in trouble. It meant that you had been sent down to The Office and into the deepest dungeon lair of the scariest monster residing There, and probably never be seen again. That was in the 70's when I went to school, anyway.

Today, our presentation team had the prospect of facing 30 or so of these mythical creatures, but thankfully throughout the weeks we'd been preparing for our song-and-dance, the numbers eventually dwindled to today's final count of 6. Coincidentally, that was exactly the number of presenters in the team too. Pupil-teacher ratio of 1:1, then. Couldn't be more perfect.

It's good to find out that Ps these days aren't anything like the stuff phobias and nightmares are made of any longer. We had been preparing to be torn to shreds by a no-nonsense squad who would be critical and suspicious of whatever we said, being that they are busy people and would take a very dim view of other people who waste their time. Instead, our 6 guests were warm and cordial, interested in what we had to say (even though at points we tended to ramble off topic a bit), offered relevant views and opinions during discussion opportunities, tried their best to apply what materials we were feeding them, and most of all, they were appreciative of us.

While it may be true that doctors make the worst patients, I just discovered that these Ps made the best students I've ever had the pleasure of teaching. They genuinely came with the intention to learn from us, raw as we are in our attempts to apply some kind of critical thinking structure to our curriculum. Yes, that was the content of our presentation, if you must know.

Personally, I'm quite gratified that despite their earlier prejudices against Wallace + Gromit, they saw many uses for Nick Park's creations in their own schools after they watched a segment from "The Wrong Trousers" I screened for them as part of my presentation.

So that's over, more or less. Think it went quite decently well. Heh.

Just finished reading Anthony McGowan's "Hellbent." It looks like a kid's book. I found it in the Young Adults' section of a Times Bookshop. It reads like a kid's book. It is full of juvenile, sophomoric toilet humour, and is overflowing with excruciatingly hideous idioms and similes only a 14-year-old boy could come up with, and only his scabby 14-year-old chums would chuckle at due to peer pressure.

The cover graphic is a simple looking label that reads, "WARNING: The most disgusting book you'll ever read." Now, that's really targeting a 14-year-old audience, and I had to go pick it up. And I couldn't put it down after that.

I don't know what the kiddies who persuaded their parents to buy this book think of it, but I think it's one of the most disturbing depictions of what hell is like without getting all religious and preachy about it.

In fact, McGowan looks at the concept of hell more from a philosophical point of view, examining arguments about the human condition, free will, existentialism, morality, justice, and the nature of hell itself: what it is, how it operates and how it devises specific torments particularly tailored to maximize the individual's misery with respect to the sins the individual is being punished for. McGowan is clear that in hell there is NO atonement, just unceasing eternal punishment.

The individual in question is a 16-year-old boy who is killed by an ice-cream truck(!) and goes to hell ostensibly for being a teenage prat. His personal hell is to spend eternity having nothing to do but read from a huge library of philosophy books and listen to nothing but classical music. He gets the idea that there must be someone else in hell who's suffering from the torments of having to play violent video games and listen to loud music for eternity. His quest then is to find this little corner of hell and trade places with its occupant so that even if they have to spend forever in hell, they would at least be doing things that they liked.

His journey through hell shows us hell's different facets, where every section and every district while being different in form from one another is the same, if not worse, in function -- causing pain, misery and suffering to the souls of the damned.

"Hellbent" doesn't seem like a cautionary tale. It doesn't really offer any tips about how to avoid going to hell, anyway. It doesn't say that hell is our inevitable end, either. What I think McGowan is getting at is that, mitigating circumstances notwithstanding, there are choices and there are consequences. Hell is only a consequence.

Which got me thinking along a similar thread to NBS some days ago: why is it that the decisions we make within our lifespan -- measured in mere decades -- should result in consequences that last throughout eternity? That doesn't seem all that fair, does it?

Parents, unless you want to spend lots of time answering difficult questions, or comforting your kiddies from their nightmares, I suggest you avoid buying this book as a bedtime story for junior. This might be a great text if you take KI though. Wanna borrow it, NBS?

Got an evening out with June, along with Amy, Dee, HP and Vince. At Amy's suggestion we got tix for Bush's Brain, a film documentary peek behind-the-scenes of the W Bush political campaign engine.

It was interesting to see the allegations made against Carl Rove, the person whom the documentary claims is the real "Brain" behind the President. For people who watch wrestling on TV, the Bush political team seems to behave like the teams that will do anything to grab championship belts and retain them at all cost. "The Four Horsemen" comes to mind, as does the now defunct "NWO." Tactics include misdirection, distraction, low blows, illegal tags, and in somehow spinning a drama for themselves or against the opposition not so much as to gain popular support but rather to cause the opposition to lose popular support.

Anyway, they play a dirty game in Washington. The documentary comes close to suggesting that W Bush becoming President is parallel to Mr Chee winning the elections and becoming PM instead of Mr Lee.

So here we have another Bush-bashing film, though not so sensational and spurious as Moore's Bowling for Columbine.

Went to the Dome at Bishan for an after movie snack. June's chili con carne was too salty and I thought the cream sauce for my mushroom pasta wasn't really cream but rather some cornstarch mixture. Blech. Maybe next time, we'll just order dessert here.

I never did mention when June came back from her Philippines tour of duty, did I? Well, she arrived home Friday night having survived a trip that wasn't as bad as she had previously imagined. I think the choice of hotel and airline made a lot of difference in making her feel safer and more at ease with her surroundings.

From the pix, I can tell she's happy to be home. And she's brought a bunch of hastily acquired souvenirs (mostly grocery items from a supermarket at prices she couldn't say, "no," to) back with her.

Wonder if this is going to be just the first of many overseas business trips for her? Apparently, there's plans for her to visit HK next, maybe in May.

My wife: a new member of the jet-set, accumulator of frequent-flyer mileage, bargain-basement shopper of souvenirs from strange and exotic locations. If I wasn't such a lazy-bum, gravid with couch-potato inertia, I'd actually be jealous.

As you can see from the missing entries, this has been one hell of a week. I don't think it's ever been this bad before, when the work has got the better of my time and attention. The long, late days; and even the slightly shorter days when I'm sitting in front of Watson wondering what else has been happening in my life apart from preparing for classes, NY conneX -- both on-line and print versions, the presentation we're giving the cluster bosses next week, oh, and the PUS as well.

It's not like all the work isn't fulfilling. I love everything I'm doing. It's that there's only so much lovin' this body can give within so short a time. If I could just focus on each task one at a time, I wouldn't be so stressed out. But having to deal with them all at once in the same week, it's like having an orgy with partners who are quite jealous of each other. Sorry, but there's only one of me and only so many orfices with which to keep everybody satisfied. Some are just going to feel slighted.

I shouldn't really complain so much. Gerald and the research kids have done a fab job on the PUS written report. The conneX 1st years have helped me lay out 50% of next week's print edition together -- a tremendous increase from the 0% of last ish. Deadlines are go for next Thursday's release, and I'm happy about that.

This evening I spent an hour as an invited guest at a 'top JC in Bishan.' It was the closing ceremony for this student-initiated-organized-run conference for youth, the idea of which was to bring all post-secondary institution kids together in an effort to understand and appreciate one another better.

I thought that was a brilliant idea, seeing as we keep stratifying and stereotyping people by their academic backgrounds. From the video clip of this overnight camp, the kids looked like they had great fun mixing with each other. My congrats to the organizer, who did what she set out to do. Determined girl, that young lady.

Hope the few KIds who went had fun too, and found some new friends from outside the college. Always good to keep expanding the horizon.

My Big Boss, the guest-of-honour, said as much in his address.

It was a closing ceremony full of technical problems: mikes that didn't amplify, equipment giving nasty feedback from some loose connection somewhere, the video clip soundtrack playing directly off the projector's pathetic little speakers, and even the stage draperies sagging. But that's the beauty of the event, isn't it? No 'professional' adult help to make things slick and smoothly run. A bit 'Kids Next Door' in improvisation, but there's the charm right there.

Hmmm... and Q-tip got groomed today. We found a fortuitous appointment slot for this afternoon, and of course, we took it. Trimmed her fur short. Now she no longer looks like the Abominable Snowball.