Ong Jiin Joo

Let’s continue to miss MJ.

Like a comet
Blazing ‘cross the evening sky
Gone too soon

Like a rainbow
Fading in the twinkling of an eye
Gone too soon

Shiny and sparkly
And splendidly bright
Here one day
Gone one night

Like the loss of sunlight
On a cloudy afternoon
Gone too soon

Like a castle
Built upon a sandy beach
Gone too soon

Like a perfect flower
That is just beyond your reach
Gone too soon

Born to amuse
To inspire to delight
Here one day
Gone one night

Like a sunset
Dying with the rising of the moon
Gone too soon
Gone too soon

The ability of iPhone to do Internet Tethering is awesome, and was finally put to good use this morning when I started writing this while stuck in Ubi Kah Motor waiting for my car to get oiled nicely. They did put down Internet kiosks around, but by forcing you to stand to use it isn’t really as great a value proposition as their car-related offerings.

We the consumers shifts our behavior slowly as more and more technology come to bombard us. I know. I sift through imbX last week only to learn that actually most of the “new stuff” I know aren’t commercially viable yet (or businesses are relatively careful before jumping in) but these things are there, staring at you, waiting to take away another part of you. I’ll soon forget about Wireless@SG if this tethering thing becomes a norm for me. That means more social networks, less human interaction, and some say, more stupid.

And yet, life goes on. I still need a roof over my head. Today will mark the beginning of my “SG house hunt”, to find a 3 dimensional space in the middle of the air where I won’t have to pay RENT anymore, but MORTGAGE. Cool eh, unlocking your CPF is always a great thing - instant wealth attained. But with the prices of residential properties not cooling _way_ off, it still bothers me that I didn’t have the guts to enter pre-boom, and placed bets in Malaysia instead just as RM was floated some 4 years back.

One day every place will be too expensive to live, and most cities spaces will be owned by corporates, and everyone will rent. In fact, just look at the car industry in S’pore - everyone is effectively renting a car, especially until recently when one can take back cold hard cash for selling a car. Education is a loan, or a good number of years working off your scholarship bond. Even as “success” these days is defined as being high in asset and low in liability (ala Rich Dad Poor Dad), who doesn’t get into debt, sans some famous book writers? Getting into another half a million dollar debt when the 1st half a million is still outstanding means more labor, less rest, and some day, no future (工字不出头).

And yet, life goes on. I still need to eat. Can’t borrow money to eat so I’ll still need to earn enough to put food on the table. I literally starved today, since I’ll be spending a bomb in the wedding tonight, I thought maybe I could just clean up the dishes while the rest catch up. I started a routine of having breakfast at home instead of buying expensive Suntec breakfast (nothing wrong with being expensive - we all have to pay rent). And I also plan to start some form of alternate day dinner where I’ll cook instant noodle, the only economically cheaper alternative to hawker food.

Every week, I jog. It’s not regular, it’s a best effort thing, but it still averages to a weekly commitment to dedicate time for exercise. There’s barely time for anything else, blogging, gaming etc. Even meet-ups with friends has decreased drastically, in view of a large number of outstanding projects to deliver to clients after work. I was proud that I made time for my parents when they were here in a previous weekend though. Nevertheless, as my body age, the ever lasting youth in my heart has become very out of sync with the body. I remember I used to run, whatever I’m working on. Time is too precious to be wasted in walking. The knee continues to remind me of an aging body that needs extra attention. Am I fat? Oh dear, do I sound like a girl?

And yet, life goes on. People who wants my resume still wants my resume. People who wants my time still demands my audience. People who ignored me still ignores me. It is this very straight-forward life that has killed the very me that I long to be, because everything made sense, everything has a cause and effect, everything puts you in a position of mediocrity, so that you can be the best. Be the best of the mediocre.

I sleep everyday with a sunk heart. I couldn’t give the people who constantly want to chat with me on MSN all the time of my life. I couldn’t give the blind musician on the street the price of a concert ticket. I couldn’t give my parents the family that they desire. I couldn’t give my customer the impeccable customer service that I set out to give. I couldn’t take in new interesting projects that would build on my passion. Heck, I couldn’t drive regularly to work thanks to ERP, Parking and all those stupid speed cameras. I mean, have you ever seen a driver who drive by actively staring at the ceiling of a road tunnel finding the next “Speed Camera Ahead” sign while leaving all other reactions to road conditions to the sub-conscious part of the brain?

But yet. Life is full of surprises. Looking forward to a good dinner small talk.

Long live Internet Tethering.

By Perpetuum Jazzile

Nice? The song is like bonus track

Snapped from wikipedia:

Google: Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
Google: Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal.
Boeing: Bet the pot on the B-17, 707 and 747.
IBM: Commit to a $5 billion gamble on the 360; meet the emerging need of our customers.
Ford: “Democratize the automobile.”
Microsoft: “A computer on every desk and in every home.”
Motorola: Invent a way to sell 100,000 TVs at $179.95; Attain six-sigma quality; win the Baldridge Award; launch Iridiums.
Philip Morris: Slay Goliath and become the front-runner in the tobacco industry, despite the social forces against smoking.
Sony: Change the worldwide image of Japanese products as poor quality; create a pocketable transistor radio.
Disney: Build Disneyland - and build it to our image, not industry standards. To be the best company in the world for all fields of family entertainment.
Nokia Siemens Networks: Connecting 5 billion people by 2015.
Symbian: To become the most widely used operating system in the world.
Amazon: Every book, ever printed, in any language, all available in less than 60 seconds.
Amazon: Earth’s most customer centric company.
Jiin Joo: *still thinking*

What’s your Big Hairy Audacious Goal or BHAG?

Live Refugee Channel (what an irony) - 3 days to World Refugee Day

Visit refugeedaylive.org for more information (or if the stream above doesn’t work).

Well, if you’re this Jay’s children, that is. Jay shared about How to Teach a Child to Argue, which ironically applies very well even in adult situation.

How to Teach a Child to Argue

Why would any sane parent teach his kids to talk back? Because, this father found, it actually increased family harmony.

By Jay Heinrichs

…

Why on earth would any parent want that? Because persuasion is powerful. Rhetoric originated in the lawsuits of ancient Greece, when citizens who weren’t good at persuading could lose their houses — or their lives. It was a staple of education until the early 1800s, teaching society’s elite how to debate, make public decisions, and reach consensus.

…

And let’s face it: Our culture has lost the ability to usefully disagree. Most Americans seem to avoid argument. But this has produced passive aggression and groupthink in the office, red and blue states, and families unable to discuss things as simple as what to watch on television. Rhetoric doesn’t turn kids into back-sassers; it makes them think about other points of view.

I had long equated arguing with fighting, but in rhetoric they are very different things. An argument is good; a fight is not. Whereas the goal of a fight is to dominate your opponent, in an argument you succeed when you bring your audience over to your side. A dispute over territory in the backseat of a car qualifies as an argument, for example, in the unlikely event that one child attempts to persuade his audience rather than slug it.

Read the rest >>

Combine the above with the “Reasonable Person Principle“, and I think you would be in a very compelling position to get what you want.

TPO is playing Chamber Music again - but this time, it’s 1 each of violin, double bass, clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, trombone and percussion, just 7 people accompanying a narrator, the Soldier and the Devil. If you haven’t read the story before, try Wikipedia’s entry for The Soldier’s Tale for a start, or just forget it and come to the concert on 12th July, 7:30pm at Esplanade Recital Studio! Click on the poster to buy tickets now!

Ever wanted a taste of the things Computer Scientist thinks about? This essay was so well written I actually read it twice. All you need is high school math to appreciate most of it.

Read Who Can Name the Bigger Number by Scott Aaronson (Asst. Prof, EECS, MIT)

In an old joke, two noblemen vie to name the bigger number. The first, after ruminating for hours, triumphantly announces “Eighty-three!” The second, mightily impressed, replies “You win.”

A biggest number contest is clearly pointless when the contestants take turns. But what if the contestants write down their numbers simultaneously, neither aware of the other’s? To introduce a talk on “Big Numbers,” I invite two audience volunteers to try exactly this. I tell them the rules:

You have fifteen seconds. Using standard math notation, English words, or both, name a single whole number — not an infinity — on a blank index card. Be precise enough for any reasonable modern mathematician to determine exactly what number you’ve named, by consulting only your card and, if necessary, the published literature.

So contestants can’t say “the number of sand grains in the Sahara,” because sand drifts in and out of the Sahara regularly. Nor can they say “my opponent’s number plus one,” or “the biggest number anyone’s ever thought of plus one” — again, these are ill-defined, given what our reasonable mathematician has available. Within the rules, the contestant who names the bigger number wins.

Are you ready? Get set. Go.

The rest of the essay >>>

In about 30 minutes, the author brings you through Exponentials, Fermat’s Last Theorem, Halting Problem, NP Complete and even Busy Beavers But I thought to the laymen, the first section on exponentiation is the most important for their daily lives. As a result, we often fail to see the multiplicative effects of our actions.

In perhaps a worldly view, the author quotes examples like this:

But do people fear big numbers? Certainly they do. I’ve met people who don’t know the difference between a million and a billion, and don’t care. We play a lottery with ’six ways to win!,’ overlooking the twenty million ways to lose. We yawn at six billion tons of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere each year, and speak of ’sustainable development’ in the jaws of exponential growth. Such cases, it seems to me, transcend arithmetical ignorance and represent a basic unwillingness to grapple with the immense.

As for me, besides hearing comments like “so what’s the difference between 1Mbps and 1Gbps, if the website is going to load slowly anyway”, I’m often amused by the smallest gestures like “let’s sell our product / idea by engaging each of our customer / stakeholder one by one, starting from the largest”, or “we have 100,000 companies to attend to, so we should start with the first 100 (and ignore 99,900 of them)”. This is plainly ignoring the large number, or unwilling to think out of the box, like writing an exponential number, or an Ackermann sequence. People are unwilling to open up to a number that they don’t have the “biological instinct” to manage, such as putting up something on the web for millions to see and comment versus conducting surveys manually. Those who grapple with such large numbers eventually win, because in the process the person would have managed to simplify the representation to an effective operation.

So the next time you’re scoping a problem, ask yourself is there a way to articulate your scope in an exponential manner. Instead of having, say, a branch office serve 1000 customer per day, ask yourself if you can virtualize your service and make them available in any shops, or resold by more distributors. Instead of saying that you will put up X number of posters for 100X eyeballs, ask yourself how to generate a campaign that yields a 1-to-10 person word-of-mouth effect. Instead of getting your boss for a remuneration amount (boss give me $1000 more please), perhaps ask for a numeration multiplier (boss increase my salary by 1% if I complete my weekly work on time) - who knows, he might be like the King who agreed to the Grand Vizier in Persia modest reward.

Reflecting on an article Yoke Yong sent earlier to me on how CFA is now chic again in a recession. So what if 128600, took the exam, and approximately some 40% x 40% x 40% (3 levels) i.e. 8230 new CFAs enter the market every year?

A professional certification is just that - a prove of quality, excellence, dedication. By the way money was earned in wall street, money cannot be earned with this cert. In fact, I’d argue that the people who earn the most money in history has no cert. A professional is a specialization that humanity needs to become ever more productive as a collective by focusing on a specific skill set, while staying abreast with the wild and confusing world out there, which is known to some as being a T-shape individual. If you lost your income and attribute it to the lack of certification, then I think there needs to be a rethinking of what exactly are you missing - it might be knowledge and training, but maybe it’s just greed, and a CFA certainly does not quench that thirst.

*waiting 2 months for the results*

Keeping a copy here long term. Originally from The New Yorker.

Download The Malay Dilemma by Ian Buruma from The New Yorker [PDF]

Judging from the general sentiment online, there were quite a lot of detractors. I must say that most articles written on US publications do have their own bias towards their version of liberal thoughts. Cut them some slack la. On the other hand, the command of the language and the way certain thought were articulated in a mixture of quotes, keen observations and historical perspectives is definitely worth emulating.

Ian must be sad that the roof of the Terengganu stadium he saw fell down liao.. keke!