Why I'm Not On Facebook

I'm on my way back to Kuching and I'm stuck in a queue at the Tiger Airways check-in desk. There's a woman behind me talking very loudly on the phone.

"Hello!" she says, in Mandarin, "Yes hello Mr Wong I'm going back to Kuching now. Oh no the last person said that he wants to buy the unit for four fifty. Oh wait you're from Kuching too? Ahh! I didn't know that! You need ... oh you need the office number? I tell you what, I can't go online right now - but if you send me a message on Facebook I'll get back home tonight and send you a message with all the contact information. Yes, just find me on Facebook - you're my friend, right?"

I turn around, balancing the trio of bags I'm lugging around with me. The woman is in her late 20s, or early 30s, I can't be sure. She has laugh lines around her eyes. I look down, and I realize she's in office attire.

People making business transactions through Facebook, I thought, Waddya know?

*

Almost everyone I know has the same reaction when I tell them that I don't have a Facebook account. "What?!" they say, incredulous, "Why?". This has happened enough times that I'm sick of it, and I think it'd do to explain - just once - why I'm not on Facebook. Hopefully I won't ever need to explain my stand again. (Also: most people - after learning that I'm not on Facebook, try to convince me that I should sign up, and it'll only take a couple of seconds, and that it's free, and you know - why not?. Hopefully this post gives them pause).

I have a couple of reasons. I'll begin with the most mundane.

1.
I come to Facebook from Friendster. Friendster was bad. I spent two years of my life tweaking my profile and uploading awesome pictures of myself and writing testimonials for other people (and zealously watching my testimonial count) and then Friendster died. So I was really lazy to do that all over again, on a new social network I wasn't sure would last. My sister Charlene was lazy too. She's not on Facebook because she thinks "it's a waste of time".

But I'll admit - I was wrong about the first bit. I was wrong on Facebook not lasting. Facebook is cool, smart, and growing strong.

2.
I'm in computer science, and that means that I spend most of my time on a computer. I work on my computer, I study at my computer, and I relax doing stuff on my computer (though not always - I like taking long walks, lately).

I probably won't be as productive if I had a Facebook account. Facebook is incredibly addictive. And so it's weird - people say "you're in computing but you're not on Facebook?!" as if it's a crime - but of the people I know without Facebook accounts, almost all of them are CompSci majors. There's a simple reason for that: we can't turn our computers off to study, and so we value the ways in which we spend our computer time more than most other people do.

3.
In actual practice, staying out of Facebook isn't as bad as one may imagine. You don't know everything your friends are up to, but that's alright - if the experience was awesome they'd tell you it was awesome, and you'd be able to judge from the light in their eyes and tone of voice the degree of truth to what they're saying. And if it wasn't awesome, then they just won't tell you.

Being outside Facebook does another weird thing to you: it forces you to really listen to your friends when you meet up. Because you're not on the network, you can't tell yourself: 'oh I know what you think of so and so' based on a 200-word status update; instead you ask 'what do you think of so and so?' and then you really listen because you can't pretend to know. Sometimes this is annoying, because you're missing out on a readily available stream of information on the people you care most about. But most of the time it works out: you don't need so much information; you only need to know about your closest friends. And nobody has more than a handful of close friends. (By extension, updates from the rest are more noise than anything else.)

The other objection that my friends have with me is "but how are we going to stay connected?!" And my answer to that is: email me. I check my email on a daily basis, and I respond, archive, or delete email within 12 hours of reception. It's the only way I can handle school, work, and membership in four separate mailing lists.

4.
I keep two separate identities on the web. Most of my work with eBook and format spec groups happen under the name Eli James. I run Pandamian under Eli James, because the name carries some influence now in eBook circles. Facebook forces me to consolidate my two identities. I can't really do that.

5.
There's this thing Facebook does when you're about to delete your account. They say: x, y and z won't be able to connect with you if you quit Facebook! Are you really really sure?

I think that's morally despicable. Facebook's using my friends to ransom me to stay with the site. I understand why they're doing it, but it's a little like inviting me to a party and threatening me with my pals to get me to stick around.

6.
Facebook makes you lonely.

I'm not the first one to make this observation: Daniel Chong tweeted recently that teenagers, today, are the most connected in the history of mankind, and yet also the most lonely. I've thought about what he said for a bit, and I think he has a point. It's probably not a coincidence.

There's a simple reason for this, I think: when you're surfing Facebook you're looking at photos of beautiful people having fun. Because that's what people upload to Facebook, right? You see people posing in exotic places, or traipsing down cornfields, or partying their heads out at clubs and bars and other glamorous places. And because you're alone when you're surfing your social network, you feel left out. You feel as if there's a perpetual party going on, with somebody you know in it, and it's happening somewhere in the city but you're not invited.

Except that this isn't true. You just feel that way because all you see on Facebook are event pictures. And it's a warped view of the world. The true things that matter in life happen far away from event photos, and by extension, from the bluster of your social network. They happen in the private space between two lovers, or in the silent zone of the solitary builder. (Zuckerberg himself wrote the first version of Facebook in a month). Nobody changed the world by hanging out on Facebook all day long. And if you do so, you'll end up feeling rather lonely. For little marginal benefit.

7.
I'm not as connected because I'm not on Facebook. But I'm also not as lonely; I don't feel an urge to go hang out and take pictures to stave off a growing boredom (or to keep up with the perpetual party going on in the network). I take pleasure in spending long hours with a small group of friends, building things that matter to the world. Partly because that's cool, but mostly because it's fun.

I think that's a fairly good trade. Probably not for everyone, but good enough for me.

Breakfast at Mama's, and Some Photos

I had a free day, one day after the Books in Browsers conference concluded. I spent it having breakfast with my hosts at downtown San Francisco (three of the four housemates - Akshita stayed in because she had a meeting at Stanford later in the day). So we drove down - Xiao Chen had discovered this 4.5 star breakfast place on Yelp called Mama's and she chucked the address into the GPS and off we went.

The queue - true to form, as I later found out - was an hour long. Outside. In the cold.


(Those two ahpeks you see in the foreground? They were British, and as they walked by one said to another: "Boy, this place must be popular, ae?" in this Brit accent - which is very refreshing to hear, in California.)

So in the end Rollen and I decided to let Jenson and Xiao Chen wait it out in the queue, while we explored the surrounding neighbourhood. I wanted to photograph the roads. (Rollen was glad for an excuse to walk). We decided to get coffee for the other two, and stopped a lady crossing the street with a tray of coffee cups under her arm.

"Where'd you get the coffee, ma'am?" I asked.

"Oh - there's this place called Greco's. They have the best coffee in the neighbourhood, in my opinion. It's down the street, two and a half blocks down, look for the illy umbrellas out on the patio."

"What do you mean by ... good?" Rollen asked.

"Well I think -" and she paused, looking off into the distance, "this is my take, mind; but the coffee there tastes exactly like the coffee I had while I was in Europe. Love it. Only place I'd ever buy coffee, from around here."


I got a mocha for me and Xiao Chen, and a latte for Jenson. When we got back the queue was just as long, and they were in the middle of it.

"I think you should go figure out what you want for your order." Xiao Chen said, as she lifted her mocha off the cardboard tray.

I took photos of the dogs in the queue, and then stopped a lady in an overcoat leaving the restaurant -

"Was the food good, ma'am?"

"Ooh, you're in for a treat! Yes, it's good. Very, very good. First time here?"

"Yeah - from Singapore, and it's my last day in San Francisco today -"

"Right. These guys are famous for their french toast, so you'll be wanting the monte cristo, if you don't mind spending extra, that is ..."

"What's that?"

"Ahh - french toast and ham and cheese. A bit on the pricey side, but worth every penny!"


She wasn't kidding. I ordered the monte cristo, and we all agreed it was the best of four orders. The sandwiches are dipped into egg and grilled shut, and on the inside you get turkey, ham, and cheddar and havarti cheeses.


Served with grilled potatoes, orange and strawberry slices and homemade (really, in this case!) cranberry jam.

Rollen had the Sampler:


Which was banana bread french toast and fruit (he didn't like it). Xiao Chen and Jenson had crab benedict and shrimp benedict respectively:


We spent some time traipsing around the rest of the city that day - I'm surprised as to how steep some of the streets are in San Francisco, and how normal it seemed to the residents there.


It is, apparently, perfectly normal to find a 30-40 degree incline in downtown SF. Imagine biking (or skateboarding!) down one of those slopes!


And then there was Market Street, the posh financial district in downtown SF:


I took most of these on my first day in the city, because I had to buy an AT&T sim card and there weren't any at Ocean Avenue. So I took a BART down and wandered about, asking for directions.


San Francisco was ... an interesting place. But I arrived in Singapore this morning, and am glad to be back.

Pandamian: A Publishing Support Layer

This is the full text of a speech I gave at Books in Browsers, a technical meeting for people currently changing the future of books. The meeting was between the 21st and the 22nd of October, and was organized and held at the Internet Archive.

Hi, my name is Eli and I’m here to talk to you about what we’re doing at Pandamian. More importantly, I want to give you an idea - or some intuition, perhaps, about the problem space in which Pandamian exists.

But before that, two things:

First, there was quite a bit of talk at BiB yesterday about how young people don’t care about their privacy. Well, I am a young person - possibly the youngest person in this room - and I care so much about my privacy that I’m speaking to you under a pseudonym. So … make of that what you will.

Second, I promised my folks back home that I’d thank the people who made it possible for me to be here. I am a second year Computer Science student at the National University of Singapore, and that means that I am on a student budget. The only reason I can be here is because of the kindness of a couple of people. So I’d like to thank Brewster Kahle, who kindly subsidized part of my flight. And my school, the School of Computing. And last, but not least, the awesome, awesome people over at the Singaporean Hackerspace, who donated to my trip - you can see their logo behind me - I promised that I’d wear their shirt and do this before my talk.

Anyway, back to what I want to speak to you about. I don’t have much time to do this, so I’m going to split my talk into three bits. First, I want to talk about the problem space to which Pandamian is a solution. Then I’ll spend 2-3 minutes on Pandamian - just a little while; I promise you that it won’t be a plug. Last, I want to talk about why I think it’s important to do what Pandamian is currently doing. And why I think more people should do it.

Web Fiction
So here’s the context: I’m coming from this place called web fiction. What web fiction is is that it’s this simple idea - not a particularly new idea, because I know a group of writers who’ve been doing this since 1997. Also not a particularly original idea. But it is a simple idea, and that idea is that you take some fiction - a novel, for instance, and you put that online. You post one chapter a week, there are reader comments, and all this happens on a blog-like website, or a blog-powered website, or - if the writer is not a particularly good programmer or designer, which is very often - sometimes on an actual blog. Which can be bad.

Where I come from in this space is that I wrote a web fiction thing 5 years ago. And at the end of that year I realized that I really didn’t know what I was doing. Nobody knew what they were doing. There were no ‘best practices’.

And there are several interesting problems there. For instance: what’s the best way to design fiction in the browser, when the browser is an inherently distractive container? Also: where do you find readers? How should you talk to readers? How long should your chapters be? How many times a week should you update your story? These are all interesting questions, and nobody knew how to solve them.

So what I did was I started this blog called Novelr, and what Novelr does is that it collates and kind of collects the best ideas as solutions to these problems. And we’ve got four years worth of experience now on how to do this - we know, more or less, what works or doesn’t work when you’re presenting fiction on a webpage, in this interactive web format.

And it’s not just me. I sometimes do experiments myself, but these ideas aren’t just from me. Sometime over the last four years of Novelr’s existence a community of writers condensed around the blog. So now I approach these writers whenever they discover a new technique, or hack, or trick to write better web fiction, and I ask them to share it with the rest of the community. Or they come to me and say: ‘I’ve discovered this, I want to share it with everyone, may I do a guest post?’ Which is cool.

But now we come to an interesting question we must ask, don’t we? Why do these people do web fiction?

You have to remember that when I said web fiction a minute ago, most of you were probably thinking about fan fiction. Which is a stigma, and is possibly the standard of rubbish in the publishing industry. And there’s also the fact that - for the longest time - publishers would not publish anything that’s available for free on the Internet. Dominique tells me this is no longer true, but for the longest time this was the policy, and the conventional wisdom was that if you were serious about your work you wouldn’t put anything, at all, online.

So there must be some compelling reason to have these writers do web fiction. Because it would seem as if doing web fiction was equivalent to shooting their career in the proverbial foot. And the web fiction community has been growing in the past four years. And the rate of that growth has been increasing. So ... why?

It turns out that a member of the community did a survey two or three months ago, and it confirmed several suspicions I had about why these writers were doing what they were doing.

There are two primary reasons to do web fiction.

The first reason is that these writers are … well, writers. They love writing. They’re already writing anyway. And it’s likely that they have paper manuscripts in their drawers, or cupboards, gathering dust, as they do what they love. What putting their fiction on the Internet does for them is that it gives them an external motivation to keep writing. I’m not sure about you, but I find that when I blog, I write more consistently and more often than if I were to write an essay on paper to figure things out. And as it is true for me, and for bloggers, so it is true for these writers.

The second reason is the more important one. What these writers experience - well I want you to imagine this. Imagine that you’re a writer, and you’ve just finished writing a chapter and you put that online. Now what happens is that a couple of hours after this - if your web fiction is good; or if it’s one of the more established ones - you get readers arguing in your comments. And they say things like: “Oh, I don’t like this character!” or “Oh, I don’t like that character” or “Oh I think this character is going to backstab that character!” and so on so forth.

Now this is incredibly fulfilling for a writer to have. Powerfully fulfilling. I’ve had traditionally published writers come to me for advice on how to do this, and I point them to multiple sources, and they tell me: “Oh no, I’m just doing this for a hobby.” And then, a couple of months later, I go to their blogs or they email me, saying “Oh my God. Oh my God. I can’t imagine doing this any other way now. Why didn’t I do this earlier?!”

And I’ve also had writers - and there are many in the web fiction community - who started this web fiction thing because they wanted to get published; they were aspiring authors. And now they no longer want to get published. Because they’re having these amazing, joyous, fulfilling writing experiences.

Now this is an indicator that writers don’t really want to get published. What they really want is these amazing, fulfilling reader interactions. The kind of interaction that’s similar to: you’re a writer, and you’re walking down a street, and a reader comes up to you and says: “Oh my God, I just read your book yesterday, it was amazing! It changed my life! Thank you!” - that’s what writers really want. And for the longest time getting published - traditionally - was a means to that end. If you give writers an alternative to this that is less painful, simpler, instantly gratifying - by gum, they will jump on it.

This is also, perhaps, a signal that web fiction - or whatever it’s going to be called - will be a significant part of the book future.

Now there’s another question to ask. If the reasons for doing web fiction are so compelling, why aren’t more writers doing it, as opposed to eBooks and such?

I have two suspicions as to why. No data here - just suspicions. The first is that eBooks are big today because of what Apple’s doing and what Amazon’s doing. So there’s a lot of attention there and that’s where writers are turning to. That’s just good PR.

But the second reason is: this technology is hard. It’s hard! Most writers are terrible programmers, terrible designers. And over the past two years, as the community’s rate of growth has increased, I began to grow sick of writers contacting me to complain, or to ask for technical help to design their blogs, their sites, to make them readable and ready for web fiction and such. I began to grow tired of being tech support.

So that’s how Pandamian got started. I’m doing it with two friends - Joash and Yipeng, and we’ve been doing it for half a year now, though we wrote code for maybe the last three months.

Pandamian
What Pandamian is is that it’s a Wordpress.com for writers. It’s a CMS, just a CMS, but the design is done; the backend interface is simple. Essentially everything we’ve learnt over the past four years on how to make fiction readable in the browser will be incorporated into the design.

And the eventual aim for what we want is to have one-click ebook conversion to any ebook format you want; one-click ‘create an ebook store to sell books on your site’; one-click push to ebook distribution channels like the Kindle store or Smashwords, or whatever.

We really want to make this simple. And by simple I mean that not only can some 16 year old kid can use this, but also my 60 year old grandfather, if he so decides to write his memoir.

That means a couple of things. Plugins? … no. Wordpress? … no. My grandfather is not going to understand Wordpress’s interface. There are too many elements. Most of them aren’t needed, and it’s incredibly confusing. When you log into Pandamian the first thing you see is this:



And that’s it. It’s WRITE, REVISE, RESPOND, CUSTOMIZE (and SETTINGS) and as we add features we’re going to slot it all into this. I’m sorry I can’t show you the software right now; I don’t have enough time.

So that’s Pandamian. But now I want to go into the last bit of my talk.

Make Technology Boring
Why are we so interested in making things simple? Why are we so passionate about making things simple? That’s an important question to ask.

What I believe in - and this is the crux of my talk; this is the idea that I really want to push here - what I believe is that you can only change the world if the technology is boring.

Take blogging, for instance. Blogging has changed the way we read news, it has changed the way we share ideas and opinions. But blogging the social phenomenon only happened when blogging the technology became boring, and trivial.

It is trivial today to create a blog - you go to Blogger.com or Wordpress.com and you can get a blog up and running in a couple of seconds. It is equally trivial to subscribe to a blog, or to create an RSS feed from a set of blog posts. This wasn’t always true. In the early days of the Internet you had to be able to program - to write CGI scripts - if you wanted to create a dynamic website. And the permutations of blogs that exist today only happened when blogging - the technology - became boring.

And so it is with publishing. It is not easy to publish a book, online, today. It is not easy to do up an ePub. We've had lots of talk about new standards and such at BiB over the past day or so. But that's useless to a 60 year old grandpa. He can't use it because it's too hard to use, even if it's easy and boring for us programmers to do. But if we can make the technology to publish boring enough that anyone can write digitally, cool things will happen. Which is kind of what we’re doing at Pandamian: on one level we’re working to solve these pain points that Novelr’s community currently has. But on another level we’re trying to make the technology boring.

The end goal, of course, is to make writing online the first option for writers looking to get published. No longer is it: write, push to agent, look for publishers. No. This shouldn’t be the way to do things. It should be: write online, get a reader base around your fiction, experience this amazing, fulfilling writing experience, and then look for agent, look for publisher.

Because if that happens, and writing online becomes the norm; the first step to getting published, then all sorts of cool things can and will happen. Really I think two things will happen.

First, we’d enable the creation of newer, cooler publishing startups. Think about Twitter. Twitter as we know it today was only possible when blogging became widespread. Without blogging we wouldn’t have that model of thinking about updates that Twitter currently has; that Twitter has borrowed. And now imagine the kinds of publishing startups that will be possible if and when writing online becomes a norm.

Second, if you have writers opting to move online as a first choice, rather than as an alternative - you will enable publishers to do cool things. And by that I mean you’ll force publishers to do cool things. And I plan to do this. In fact I was probably invited to speak here on the basis of an essay I wrote, with the weird title: ‘To Change Publishing, Make Publishers Obsolete.’

What I mean by that is - when what you’re doing becomes a threat to their model, publishers would be forced to innovate in this space. To their eventual benefit, I think.

So what are some of the things publishers can do? I have several ideas. Maybe publishers may now choose which authors to publish from online filters. Either they build the filters or some third party builds the filters, but if the majority of writing is online - that’s just data, right? You can now figure out which are the most popular series, what geographical locations are certain kinds of content popular, which market segment of your audience and so on - and use that to decide which author to publish. Which is better than the arbitrary process of publishing writers from agent submissions and old boy networks.

Maybe - just maybe - you can have aggregated notes, or shared reading experiences. Because all this is in HTML, right? And it’s networked, and open. And that makes these kinds of things possible.

And maybe citations in the future will be possible - and you can link not only to an actual page, but also to actual paragraphs. Because this is a website, and it’s just HTML and anchor text.

And these are not just my ideas, by the way. These are originally Craig Mod’s ideas - and he’s sitting over there. And that thing about filters? Richard Nash is doing a filter; Cursor is essentially a filter.

Of course, some of these ideas are all pie-in-the-sky. But my point isn’t that these ideas will happen, it is that it’s only possible if we make the technology boring.

So where does this leave us? I’ll tell you where this leaves me. For the longest time we were thinking about what is it exactly that we do at Pandamian. We called ourselves a ‘Digital Publishing House.’ I realized on the way here that we’re not a digital publishing house. We’re not publishing anyone, per se. And if you’ve read the title of this talk, or if you have my card (and the tagline there - ‘Writers are The New Publishers’) you’ll see that this is true. We’re not a digital publishing house. We’re a publishing support layer. We make the technology boring, so that writers - and maybe publishers, if they want it - can take part in this shift to the web.

I should close now. And I’ll close by saying that: I am young. My two co-founders, Yipeng - from Computer Science, and Joash, our Business guy: they’re 2, 3 years older than I am. We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us.

Am I scared? Yes, I am. I’ve seen the statistics, I know that 9 out of 10 startups will fail. But I’m sick and tired of waiting for a big company to come and change this, to come and solve these pain points. I’ve been waiting for a very long time.

And so this is probably what I'm going to do for the next couple of years. We'll have to work hard on it for quite a bit. I want to make the technology boring, and to perhaps - in this manner - change the world. Thank you very much.

San Francisco Thoughts Day 1 & 2

Just a couple of quick, disconnected thoughts about SF:

1) Am bunking with four NUS students in the city. Two girls and two guys. They have a small apartment along Ocean Avenue - good location, great sofa, not too far from food. No ocean, though.

2) Suburban America is ugly. Butt ugly. I kid you not ugly. Houses are wooden and old-looking and built higgly-piggly over the hills. So where I'm staying is this grid-network of streets that are filled with houses, in clashing colours and the neighbourhood is a wee bit dodgy - Xiao Chen says that once she saw a random guy handing out pot on the street.

3) That picture I took above is not representative of the city; I just thought it was funny. (Though, yeah it's kinda representative of the neighborhood). My friends tell me there are nicer places in SF - Palo Alto, for instance, and the central areas itself nearer to Fisherman's Wharf. I agree - I've been to Montgomery Street to buy my American number, and the place was beautiful. More pictures when I can get back to my camera cable.

4) It's chilly. Lowest temperature is at 12 degrees celsius. Am wearing hoodies and beanies and jackets. Not all together, of course.

5) I'm surprised at the extent I've been spoiled by Singapore - the first train station I got off at SF I saw a black guy leap over the turnstile and run (the station operator didn't see him) and my first thought was: 'God, that'll never happen in SG!' And then a couple of minutes later two guys in civilian clothes walked through an emergency exit and waved a badge to the station operator, and nobody else stared because police were normal, and this was normal.

Badge was probably FBI though, but I couldn't be sure.

6) American food portions are huge. Jonathan tells me it's normal for people to pack the leftovers and bring them in for their next meal.

7) Also, American coins are weird. They come in denominations of 1, 5, 10, 25, 50 and a dollar. AND THEY DON'T SAY 25 THEY SAY A QUARTER wtfiwasscanningfornumbersdammit!

7) Americans don't understand Asian names - I got called Mr Wang by the guy at the AT&T store, after he registered me under the very last word in my name. Go figure. I am now registered under a slang word for penis. I am so Hung about it. Like what a Dick, right?

8) I need to sleep now. Event's tomorrow and I need to be alert. Goodnight, all.

San Francisco

A couple of things:

1) I'll be speaking at a conference in San Francisco next week. It's called Books in Browsers, organized by the Internet Archive, and is essentially a technical meeting for people currently working on the future of the book. Am subsidized by Brewster Kahle (founder of Alexa Internet and the IA), the NUS School of Computing, and the awesome people over at Hackerspace.sg.

I'll be talking about Pandamian, this little startup thing I'm doing. The underlying agenda for BiB is to consolidate efforts in the web-based publishing sphere. I suspect, too, that the IA is going to be pushing its standard for distributing book-catalog metadata: it's called OPDS, is open-source, and will be a fairly important first-step in standardizing the way books are consumed in the future.

In simple terms: what happens there is likely to change the future of reading, and so I'm rather excited to be a part of it.

2) Yes, I'm doing a startup; have been working on it for 6 months now. I'm still debating for/against writing about it on Mochaspot, because I've always kept work separate from this blog. But then again Pandamian is beginning to define my life. So we'll have to see.

3) And I'm swamped with schoolwork. Am a little worried about my math at the moment, will probably be bringing some assignments/homework to do on the plane along with me. Hope I'll survive the rest of the semester, there're only 4 weeks left!

PS: Thank God funding was possible! And I suppose I should talk a little about the journey, in a bit. But yes: I am thankful, and yes, I am in debt to so many kind people who made this possible. Thank you all.

PPS: Woohoo Paul, who's Yayasan Sarawak Champion!

MSN

I remember waiting for Friday nights, waiting for the sweet-spot, just after eight, and then I'd fire up my old Windows ME computer and log onto MSN. Because it seemed as if everyone in Kuching were online on Friday nights. And there'd be these huge group conversations, dozens and dozens of people all crammed into one window, and you had no idea who was talking to who, a mess of emoticons and teenagers and LOLs and OMFGs. It was terrible. You met new people that way. New girls, mostly. Terrible way to meet girls, or new people, or even strangers who saw your username and clicked add and went to your blog. But I loved it.

I remember sneaking online on the desktop computer, Windows XP now, blue and green light pooling into the darkness of my study room.And this was the new house - the current house - and like so many other times I found myself banned from going online. Because I had no self control. And so the times that I could go online I spent switching between MSN and talking to friends, and posting in the Undergroundsquare forums. I appeared offline in these secret periods.

I remember talking to friends late into the night. We had this theory that people were different on the Internet. Friends became odd variations of themselves in the container of a chat window. Maybe the personas were fake. Or maybe they were hidden facets of their personalities, rarely seen in real life. I had to wrap my head around that idea. And I subscribed to the second theory: it was exciting to think you were seeing bits of your friends that you've never been able to see before.

I remember 2am conversations and waiting, waiting for the right person to appear online. Because over time MSN became like that: wait offline, invisible, until the right person pops in, and then you emerge from the cellar of your contact list, eager to chat. MSN was morphing into this distracting thing. We were growing up. We learned to dump most of our crazy emotes. We began to be selective with who we talked to.

I've not logged into MSN for a full year now. Most of the time I'm really busy. Most of the time I can't remember half of the people in my contact list. (And I realize it's not called MSN anymore - it's Windows Live Messenger, or something similar - but my friends and I, we can't be bothered).

I sometimes wonder if there are kids out there, 15 years old with curfews and desktop computers, who dream of Friday nights so they can get online and chat. Because, to them, the whole of Kuching goes online to chat on Friday nights.

I wonder if that slice of Internet still exists. Because it would be sad if it didn't. They wouldn't have known what they've missed.

Cooking

I'm beginning to really enjoy cooking for others. Made beef burgers the other day, and invited Divyanshu, Tay, and Zakil over for dinner.

Not very many pictures of the food. I was too busy to do anything other than move things on and off the pan.

"Maybe I should cook for linuxNUS," I said, absentmindedly, as I mixed flour into the bowl of minced beef. I had to mince the beef myself, earlier in the afternoon, since that was the only way to make halal patties in Singapore. (It is, by the way, really hard to be a Muslim - and/or a vegetarian - in the city state).

"Not a good idea," Div said, sitting by the table with Tay's iPad cradled in his arms, "You'll probably never be free again."

I took a lump of minced meat, shaped it into a patty, and dumped it onto the pan, now simmering in low heat. I had miscalculated the amount of egg I put in earlier and was testing to see if the patty was still okay.

A couple minutes later I took it off, put it on a bun, spread chili, mayo, placed a lettuce leaf and a couple of cucumbers and tomatoes, and sliced it into quarters. Div and Tay took a piece each. "Oh," Div said, eyes wide. "Mmmmh." Tay mumbled, from the other end of the room.

"Maybe you should cook for linuxNUS."

There is a simple joy to cooking and sharing food with others. Burgers: done. Now on to other recipes.

Photolog: Kuching on Film

Shot on Fujifilm Pro 400, Olympus 35RC. Here are things I saw during the holidays.

Don't Be Afraid

I've been spending a lot of time with Madan and Zakil recently. They're both med students, the two of only three Malaysians (that managed to get into the program) in our year.


(That's Madan on the left, by the way. I don't have any good photos of Zakil - the one photo that I do like is of him holding up a human skull to the front of his face, and as you can imagine that's not particularly flattering.)

So we're walking back from dinner at the Science Canteen, and we meet Reuben - this Sabahan who's currently studying Physics at NUS. And he's distraught. He's upset. He can't get any As in his course, try as he might, and he is very unhappy about it. He's almost always unhappy when we see him, about one thing or another. The course is tough on him.

Madan hears him out. Zakil and I make Russell Peter jokes. And then we board the bus and we head back.

Somewhere along the way Zakil takes over the role as counselor, and I have a talk with Madan.

"Do you ever think, do you believe that he might -" (here I gestured at Reuben) "- get so depressed and stressed that he might kill himself?"

"No la," Madan says, "He's just going through a tough patch. He keeps feeling jealous about the other people in his class who can get As."

We walk for a bit more.

"I mean - I was like that too, when I first came to NUS. I was so frightened by all the other people in the class, all the Singaporeans. They seemed to know so much more than me. It was like - what was I doing here?"

"Really?!" I say, surprised. "But I was like that too! I was constantly watching all the other people in the course, and I was scared. Like - how can I ever get an A -"

"With all these people who are so pro around right?"

"Yes."

We continue walking.

"But in the end, I realized that it's dumb to be scared. That's nothing I can do about it what. And if I can't get As, that's alright. As long as we learn enough so we can go out to be good doctors."

"Or good computer scientists," I say, smiling a little, because that's what I'm training to be, "Or good physicists."


Life is better this way.

Insert Angsty Post Title Here

I'm sitting at the science canteen, where I'm supposed to be making notes for my biology lecture. Red plastic tabletops, brick walls, F*CK NUS graffiti scrawled in tiny handwriting on the pillar to my right. There's a grey sky overhead, and a cold wind playing about my ankles. Really rare, in humid Singapore.

I'm running on two hours of sleep and a can of coffee. Completed a whole chapter of differentiation last night. Sheer willpower. And I've done most of my schedule for today.

I suppose I should lie here and say that I'm going to blog soon. But that's not true. I've lost the ability to sit down and think thoughts about life, about the world, about my inner universe. And what a rich universe that is! There's this long backlog of ideas, stretching out into the past, and beyond a certain point there's this darkness where I can't remember. I've lost count of the number of times I've told myself: 'oh you've got to blog that', or 'that's an interesting thought, what might that mean? - perhaps write an essay to think about it?' and I never do, and so life goes on, dragging the darkness behind me. Soon I'll have thoughts and I rush to class and the darkness is but a couple hours behind, and all the interesting ideas I have for the day are lost in that fog, forever.

There's this primary school girl now, in her dark blue pinafore walking past. What she's doing in NUS is beyond me. And I wonder at how similar it is to the Malaysian primary school pinafore - and yet how different her life is, for the Singaporean education system is the most bizarre meritocratic system you've ever set your eyes on, with streaming exercises all the way down in primary 4, and your future mapped out for you based on your grades when you're 10 years old.

There you go - that's an interesting thought, all on its own. I wonder if there's anything interesting in there.

*pause*

I better get back to work.

Photolog: Hackerspace

Photolog: The Beach

Today: On Logic, Concentration and Code

(This post was originally posted to Metacog.)

I learned three new things today:

The first happened as I was coming out of the undergraduate office in COM1. I sat next to Yipeng, took out my laptop, and got thrust - almost immediately - into a conversation with a friend of his, Chris. Chris is a tutor for CS1231. He also happens to love mathematics.

Chris told me about this cool thing he had learnt last semester (the module he took is called Logic in Computer Science, and it's pretty darned crazy). The idea is called intuitionism. It goes something like this:

Let a and b be two irrational numbers. Is it true that a^b is a rational number?

It turns out that this statement will always evaluate to true, regardless of how you look at it. A simple example of this is how √2^√2 evaluates to an irrational number (and is therefore false). And yet, when you have (√2^√2)^√2, you get two irrational numbers that evaluate to a rational one. So this means that the statement "a^b is a rational number" can both be true and false: either a^b is rational, OR it is irrational, and which it is really depends on the numbers. What you have now is an OR evaluation. And we all know that a false statement OR a true statement always evaluates to true - in other words, you have a tautology.

An English example:

It is World War 2. I am enlisting to go to the frontline. I know for sure that I will or will not be killed. One of the two will certainly happen, I just can't show which. But taken as a whole, my statement "I know for sure that I will or will not be killed" is a true statement!

Well that's obvious! I said. How is this useful to computer science?

Chris grinned. "So you probably think you're smart right? That this is not beyond you? Well now try something: as a budding computer scientist, write a piece of code to prove this exact same statement."

A long silence, as Shawn and I pause to consider this puzzle. We take maybe half a minute of silence and some serious internal code-crunching before Chris cuts in: "Let me give you a hint: it is impossible to write code that evaluates that truth statement."

Wait ... what?! we said.

The reason for this, in turns out, lies in the above example of the WW2 soldier: "One of the two will certainly happen, I just can't show which." Computers can't handle things that you cannot show. And this problem - called Pv¬P, cannot be proven computationally. Chris told us that there are two kinds of logical evaluations: classical and intuitionistic logic.

Classical logic is concerned with truth. But intuitionism is concerned with justifiability. That is: if you have something like the Pv¬P problem you have something you can agree is true, but which you can't prove because you have no way to justify that conclusion. In the case of the WW2 soldier you can't prove which of the two cases it is (killed or not killed); in the case of √2^√2 you have something that may or may not be irrational.

And the link to computer science - what of it? Intuitionism, Chris says, is how you know if something is computable or not.

The second lesson I learnt today is that it pays to develop focus. I spent a full afternoon programming with Yipeng and Shawn and Low Wee, but only in the last couple of hours did I get good work done. I'm not sure if this is a focus problem - I didn't really waste time the first couple of hours, having spend all that time reading and gaining my bearings in the code - but I certainly have to train my ability to focus for longer and longer periods of time. I'm currently on 15 minutes per block of work (with a 2 minute rest in between); I hope to increase this to 20 minutes soon enough.

The third lesson today is that I have learned (or relearned!) how Python is truly beautiful. I am amazed at the level of readability inherent in Yipeng's code: I glance through it now and I usually have a good idea of what's going on. In any other language this can be attributable to programming best practices; in Python certain best practices are forced upon you. Funny - to think we used Python because Yipeng wanted an excuse to pick it up!

CS3216

On the JPA scholarships

For those not already in the know, the Malaysian government has recently announced that it would cancel all overseas JPA scholarships, with a few caveats.

The caveats being the MARA scholarships (which are limited to Bumiputeras), and the exceptional cases where students are accepted into OxBridge/the Ivies. Some of these changes have yet to be finalized, and so the details of the former (that of the MARA scholarships) may yet change. And I hope they will.

What I am particularly mad about, however, is the government's explanation of such changes. I don't usually talk politics in this blog, but this has upset me to point where I'm willing to disregard that rule for just this one occasion. Let's take a look at each of the given reasons, presented to us by Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department Datuk Seri Mohd Nazri Abdul Aziz:

1) The Government has no money
The Malaysian government is currently building an unnecessary Parliament House in Putrajaya for RM800 million, and the cost of the Jalan Duta palace project has doubled to RM800 million. These are extremes, of course - but you must ask where exactly that the government's priorities lie. Scholarships are one of the few remaining channels through which Government money goes directly back to the people (this is slightly paradoxical, considering that the money is ours to begin with).

In what universe is a RM800 million palace more beneficial to Malaysians than 1500 scholarships? The opportunity cost is that we lose 15,000 scholars in 10 years, and 30,000 in 20 years. That's a big loss for the country.

Now compare this to our tiny neighbour Singapore. The PSD scholars over there are part of a system that feeds directly into the public service. You get the PSD scholarship, you go to Oxford, Cambridge, or any one of the Ivies, and you come back and you enter the Government. In a couple of years, one or two of these people (per batch) become ministers. And the differences between our two governments are vast - the Malaysian government rarely makes sense (more on this later); Singapore's technocratic government makes too much sense, if you will, to the point where the opposition parties can't say much about the island-state's policies.

My point: when Nazri comes out and says that "We have to tell the truth. We just cannot afford it. Just like how a parent cannot afford to send their children abroad to further their studies, the government cannot afford it. We do not have the financial capacity that permits us to send every good student abroad." I think: bullshit.

Nazri continues (boy, is this guy good): "It’s impossible to increase the number of scholarships because we don’t have enough money for that when we also need money to focus on other areas."

Yes. Like RM800 million palaces.

2) Our students are too 'academically excellent'

"... Secondly, it is this: however we do it, whether we reclassify the As that the students get to A+, A and A-, the fact remains that in this year alone, the number of students who obtained 9A+ were over 1,200. This means that the boys and girls are getting more and more clever and we cannot reduce the number of scholarships we give out by re-grading the As any further,”

He also says:

"There are just too many outstanding students. Even with the new grading system, where grades are divided into three classifications, for example, A-, A and A+, there are still many students who are able to get with outstanding results.”

This is new. I have never in my entire life heard a minister from any government of any country - not even the Scandivanian nations, who presumably have the best public education in the world - complain that their students 'are getting more and more clever'. Nor have I ever heard an education minister say that 'there are just too many outstanding students'.

Nazri must think us Malaysians exceptionally stupid.

Make no mistake: this problem is real. But what it means is that either something's going wonderfully right with our education system, or the metric for academic excellence in Malaysia is meaningless and dumb. You'd think they'd raise the standards for SPM, instead of canceling overseas scholarships forever, but they don't.

3) Foreign scholarships are a contributing factor to the Nation's brain drain
Bullshit. Dumb governmental policies and institutional racism contribute to the brain drain. Being fed up with the government contributes to the brain drain. Sending people overseas, on bond, for a proper education so they may return and serve the country does not a brain drain make.

4) Keeping students in Malaysia will result in first class universities
Here's where things get interesting:

“Ultimately, the purpose is also to retain our good students here in our local universities. We want our good students to study locally and this is our long-term goal. We want our universities to be first-class. We want to retain the money here, so we finance those in local universities — we want the talent here."

I want to tackle this properly, because certain people think this point to be true. In particular, an overseas JPA scholar believes that:

Now, for Malaysia, I’m not gloating or anything, but I think Malaysia will greatly benefit from this act. (Don’t hate me for saying this). By doing this, more students will be restricted and thus will not be able to study abroad. This is result in the flooding of brains into local universities. FINALLY, SOME SMART PEOPLE WILL BE IN LOCAL UNIVERSITIES!!! Hence, the rankings of our local uni’s will get higher and higher. Quality of local education will increase, whilst not spending a great amount of taxpayers’ money on scholarships. XD

So let's take this apart, shall we?

Assumption 1: smart undergraduates mean higher university rankings.
Rubbish. University ranking is strongly correlated to quality of research. Universities are not high schools, where prestige and rank come directly from how many straight-A students you pump out. They're primarily graded according to the quality of the work they create (exaggerated example: MIT invented the Internet, Cavendish discovered DNA).

You may be right if you're talking about postgraduate students, but to be honest the only way to increase the university standards is through gaining better teachers. Case in point: NUS grabs academics from around the world by offering them generous grants for their research, with the caveat that they teach students during their stay in Singapore. Hong Kong is presumably doing the same.

So Joel's rant (FINALLY, SOME SMART PEOPLE WILL BE IN LOCAL UNIVERSITIES) is a correct prescription. Unfortunately, you don't do that by routing smart high school students to our local universities. You do that by routing brilliant academicians from other universities to come teach/research in your respective institutions. I'd make the case that if the government were truly serious about improving local universities, they'd do this instead of blatantly canceling overseas scholarships, and pretending that it does some good for our public Us while they're doing so.

Assumption 2: more local students in local universities mean better universities
I'm not sure where our government gets that idea from. A counter-example: Stanford's student-teacher ratio, in specific classes, are 1:15. If you're lucky, that's one Nobel prize winner to 15 students (Stanford has 16 laureates - and, yes, I got that 'Nobel ratio' line from the Stanford admissions website). I'm not sure how 'more students in our local universities' translates to 'better learning experience'. I'm also not sure how Joel thinks this is good for his juniors.

Not to quaffle: but if he truly believes this to be a good thing, then why not drop the overseas scholarship and sign up for a local public Uni?

I'm rather sick of this, and I'm worried for my country. I'm sure all of us know of families who would benefit greatly from such scholarships. Canceling the overseas PSD and forcing students to attend local Universities - particularly without a better education roadmap - is a disservice to our country and our people. And making such announcements with blatant illogic is a disservice to our intelligence. So I don't know. I want to believe that there's yet hope for Malaysia, but it's getting harder and harder every time the government makes such announcements. And hope I think, is the most important resource we need.

Thoughts On Tools

A friend of my dad's was eating dinner with us, a couple of nights ago, when he said something rather interesting: "Golf is a great game. It's cheap, it has strategy, and you win all kinds of cash prizes when you're playing it."

"It's cheap?!" I asked, surprised.

"Oh yes. You just buy one club, and it lasts for ten years. The expensive thing is really the club membership."

"But isn't there like - all kinds of clubs?" I asked. "Like one for sand, and one for water, and -"

"Oh no," He said, waving his hand in my general direction. "No no no no. Those are used by the lousy golf players. The good ones can play golf with any club."

*

Are tools important for doing good work? Or, phrased differently: if tools are important - then to what extent are they so?

The first thing we must be clear on, however, is that not all fields have the same attitudes towards their tools. Some fields are filled with practitioners obsessed with them. Others are not. An obvious example of this is to compare writing with photography: you don't become a good writer by having a better pen, and so you don't find people obsessing over different pen brands. Whereas with photography you get all kinds of adolescent squabbling over which camera is the better one.

This makes sense, of course: the more your work hinges on the kind of tools you use, the more likely you are to think about them. And what is true with art is also true with sports. This explains golf, which is filled with talk of the latest advancements in club technology; and — at the other end of the spectrum — basketball, where nobody really cares about the kind of shoes you use on court.

So are tools really that important? A simple way of finding out is to look at each field's top practitioners, to see what they have to say about their tools.

The funny thing, however, is that when you do that (and so long as it's a field with a proven obsession with tools) you'll begin to see a pattern that repeats itself. People at the apex use good tools, but they never seem to talk about them. They don't even appear to think about them.

Take photography, for instance. Henri Cartier Bresson, the father of modern photography, is annoyingly coy in his interviews about his practice of the form. He makes no mention of his camera, although he uses an excellent Leica rangefinder. And in fact, if you look carefully at photos of Bresson in action, you'll begin to think that he treats his camera like he would a boot. (Bresson plasters the camera with lots of ugly duct tape).

There's also this fairly famous story told of photographer Ernst Haas, in a 1985 workshop:

Two laddies from Nova Scotia had made a huge effort to be there and were great Leica fans, worked in a camera store, saved to have them and held Ernst on high for being a Leica user (although he used Nikons on his Marlboro shoots, when the chips were down).

About four days into the workshop, he finally maxxed out on the Leica adoration these kids displayed, and in the midst of a discussion, when one of them asked one more question aimed at establishing the superiority of Wetzlar, Ernst said, "Leica, schmeica. The camera doesn't make a bit of difference. All of them can record what you are seeing. But, you have to SEE."

Nobody talked about Leica, Nikon, Canon or any other brand of camera equipment for the rest of the workshop.

He also said, "Best wide-angle lens? 'Two steps backward' and 'look for the ah-ha'."

In sports this is made all the more obvious by corporate sponsorship. Federer wears Adidas on court, as he bends for the serve you see the tiny trident logo on his breast pocket; Tiger Woods appears in Nike advertisements and models for golf clubs and fancy watches. But they never seem to talk about them. At least not voluntarily.

*

I have a friend who wants to buy two camera bodies because 'the pros do it like that'. But this is ridiculous, of course. It's a bit like saying that you need to grow scales on your belly in order to become a better swimmer, because the best swimmers in the world - the fish - have scaly bellies.

If the best people in their respective fields don't obsess over their tools, then it's worth asking if the reverse is true: that if you do obsess over your tools, does that make you a lousier photographer/golfer/practitioner? Does the principle work both ways?

I'm beginning to think that it does. As of press time, the evidence I've found thus far seems to suggest that a fixation on tools can be dangerous for your sport/art. I once read an online essay arguing that the more fixated the photographer is on his gear, the lousier his photography. I found the notion ridiculous at the time - (how can a $10,000 camera not affect the quality of the pictures you take? I thought) ... but that was some time ago; I'm now beginning to see some truth in it.

Hugh Macleod's got a brilliant theory on why this happens: ".. as the artist gets more into his thing," Macleod says, "and as he gets more successful, his number of tools tends to go down. He knows what works for him. Expending mental energy on stuff wastes time. (...) The last thing he wants is to spend 3 weeks learning how to use a router drill if he doesn’t need to."

There's another reason I suspect this is true. When you buy a new, supposedly better tool, you're giving yourself a psychological crutch. Pictures don't turn out right? Oh but it's not your fault. It's the camera's. That's what you get for buying a lousy camera body. The same goes for golf clubs, and tennis racquets, and surf boards.

This assumption is dangerous because it sounds so convincing: surely the camera has as much responsibility for a bad picture as you do? But this just isn't true. If your photographs suck, 9 times out of 10 it's your fault, and not your camera's. Either your composition was off or you used the wrong settings or you didn't compensate for some of your camera's larger idiosyncrasies. Consider the fact that some of photography's most powerful images were made on film, with a shabby little device that probably had half the features you'll find in a cheap compact today.

Shiny new tools tend to be more a distraction than an aid. The cooler the tool, the more likely you are to waste your time obsessing over the purchase, or the awesome capabilities thereof, as opposed to actually getting better at whatever it is you're supposed to be doing with it.

My experience seems to bear this out. I recently switched from a DSLR to an old, dinky film camera. And my pictures have improved after the switch, despite lousy film and the lack of any onboard electronics. This doesn't mean, of course, that film cameras are better for learning photography (although a few people I know are sure to argue that this is so) - it simply means that my skills as a photographer have little or no correlation to the camera I carry. All that matters is that I know how to use that camera well.

One exception to this rule-of-thumb, however, is the field of programming. In programming, the better hackers tend to drift towards particular programming languages. And they tend to be very vocal in their support of whatever language that is. But this field is an exception, not a norm. Programming languages are expressed methods of thinking about problems, and using a better language forces you to look at things differently. So programming is one field where using a shiny new tool does make you better than you currently are.

*

There is one last bit that doesn't seem to make much sense: if the very best professionals don't seem to care much for their tools, why do they continue using the very best of their field, the same ones the amateur gear-freaks lust after? Bresson and Haas used Leicas, after all, and Federer still plays with a high-end Wilson racquet (sponsored - but costly nevertheless).

I suspect the secret to this is that while they do use the best equipment, they don't attribute anything to it. In simple terms: their attitudes towards their tools are a more telling sign of their ability than their usage of certain tools over others. If professionals don't seem to care much for their gear, it simply means that they treat it as they would any other tool: something you use to get things done.

Yoghurt

So we're at dinner, and my mum has tapau-ed food, and my sister and I are back from a run. My mum's dinner is mango with yoghurt.

"Why is organic food so expensive wan?" my sister asks. She opens the fridge and takes a tub of yoghurt, and my mum passes her a smallish container of dried blackberries.

"Good food is always expensive." mum says, and she points to the blackberries: "This is RM9.90 ... which is just crazy right?"

There's a pause. I eat my rice. Then my mum begins telling us about this awesome greek yoghurt they found in KL, and how rich and creamy and hard to find it was, and how her friend who normally hates yoghurt took a taste and loved it and how we can't find it in Kuching (tell me the name, I say, and I can buy it in Singapore; but nooo, fates be damned, she's forgotten!) and how she wish us kids could try it but instead they missed the chance to buy one tub on their way to the airport.

"I tell you, if I were living in a Western country, I'd eat yoghurt and fruit everyday." A pause. "The fruit there would be so cheap! This - " (and here she taps the container of blackberries) "- would be so cheap!"

"Oh really?" I stop eating for a bit. "If we were in a Western country, we'd be longing for bananas and papayas! And then we'll complain how come the fruit over there so terrible wan -"

"You mean there are bananas over there ka?" My sister, she has taken a pack of dried apricots and is now mixing one in with her yoghurt.

"Yah, they freeze them and ship them over, with carbon dioxide to ripen them ... or something," I say, "Akong has this friend - a priest, I think, by the name of Father Melling - who always complains that the papayas in England suck; they taste terrible over there. So we've actually got a lot to be thankful for."

And now my mum pauses for a bit. "Yahor. Come to think of it, there are more choices over here. Because we're tropical. And I think I prefer tropical fruits -"

"Exactly!" I say, "So we don't need dried blackberries and apricots right! So expensive. Might as well get some bananas and dry them -"

"Why need to dry?" My sister asks - she has tried the apricot and doesn't like it, "can't we just cut the normal bananas?"

"Because if it's dried you only buy once and then you can keep it for a long time?"

"No la," sister cuts in, "Too much of a hassle. Just buy when you need the bananas."

"And then you put it with yoghurt and blend it -" my mum says,

"But why is he called Father Melling? What a funny name!"

"... and you add honey to your bananas and yoghurt and ... yum!"

I grin. "See? So we don't actually have to buy all these expensive dried fruits! Just local fruits would do. I think it's just because we want what we cannot have -"

"Yes," my mother says, and she gets up from the table. "Now finish your dinner and then help me wash the plates."

And that was dinner conversation for today.

Stuff During the Holidays

I'm on my end-of-academic-year break at the moment. It's three months long, and I'm planning to use it to learn a couple of new things. I've been back in Kuching for 3 weeks: my days have been filled with programming for my startup, and teaching debate, and running. Quiet, productive days.

What I haven't been doing lately, however, is writing. It's been a good 4 weeks since I last wrote anything of length, and I feel my writing muscles already fraying and rotting in my head. (Not that - you know - there are muscles in my head ... but yeah you do get what I'm talking about now, don't you?)

I've got a couple of things I want to talk about, and they're all in higgly-piggly rows in my head. Some of these topics interest me a lot, because I've been thinking about them for some time now, and while I'm not sure if the ideas are right, I suspect that the only way to find out is to hash them out, on paper. What I do know is that I need to get writing now, before the new semester begins. It's the only free time that I really have.

Things I'd like to do, before the holidays are over:

• Learn recursion (i.e.: work through The Little Schemer)
• Learn proper algorithm analysis
• Revise relations and set theory (I'll probably need this for database work, and soon)
• Learn Vim (mostly done)
• Learn Python and Django (covered basic syntax for Python, still at the learning curve for Django)
• Revise graphs and trees

Loosely coupled to that is a light reading-list that I'm nearly finished with, and probably a writing schedule that I'll need to adhere to.

This feels weird - writing again. I'll need to get used to it as soon as I can.

[Update]: Somebody commented on how foreign and odd-sounding my todo list reads, and so - an explanation:

Vim is a code editor packaged with most linux/unix systems, and programmers swear by it because it allows you to do code editing on a cramped keyboard, without using a mouse. (I've already used it while lying on a couch in my grandparent's place - it works, by gum, it works!

Python is a programming language. You know Google? Well, they run on Python. (I also like how it sounds like a snake. And that allows me to make up all sorts of pun-jokes, e.g.: Python is very pretty. As a programming language! Not, you know, as a snake. Though it is a pretty snake ...)

Django is a framework for building web applications (like blogs, or Twitter, or Facebook) and I'm currently using it to build some writing software. More on that in a bit.

And ... well, the rest (recursion, graph, trees, set theory) are math stuff - and I'm not going to talk about them now because I've yet to learn anything apart from recursion (and I don't think they make for polite dinner conversation). Don't you just love polite geeks?

Photolog: Youth

Singapore is the victim of a grey population, which means that it has an expanding elderly demographic and a shrinking youth.



To maintain productivity (due in part to the growing grey population) the country has implemented a set of immigration policies to allow for a large influx of foreign talent. I remember a Time magazine article with a picture of an ang moh family on the cover, and the title: "Singapore Soars". The locals aren't happy about this, of course. And I don't blame them. On good days - in places like Holland V, where this photo was taken - Singapore feels - almost - like a small European town.




And that can be rather weird indeed.

Photolog: The Olympus 35 RC

These photos were shot with an Olympus 35 RC, on Superia 200 film. Feels weird to be taking DSLR-equivalent pictures with a camera that's about the size of my palm.

Taken on the bus, on my way to church.

Here's an interesting question to ask: why is she tapau-ing for so many people? Consider the fact that this is an early Sunday morning, and it's rather safe to assume that she's buying breakfast for the whole family. But why her? Why not someone else? Could it be possible that she's the only one who goes to church? Or maybe they attend a later service? I didn't have time to ask (was late for church!) and so I shot this and hurried away.

These kids were under a skylight.


Singaporeans don't have kids; they have dogs instead!

Visual pun! (Click here for a larger version, if you can't spot it.)

Colour pun!

I enjoyed the last one. More thoughts on rangefinders and film in a bit, got an exam to study for, first. Till then.