jeudi, février 19, 2009  Libellés : personal [My First Car!] |
jeudi, février 05, 2009 "Stephen King says ‘Twilight’ author ‘can't write’ Horror writer says series appeals to girls due to nonthreatening sex scenes http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29001524/ “Both Rowling and Meyer, they’re speaking directly to young people… The real difference is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer and Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good.”O Stephen, Stephen. You've frightened the living daylights (and many, many nights) out of me, and I thank you for that. I am wary of girls called Carrie (White/Bradshaw/Fisher/Underwood), occasionally think that drains hide clowns with sharp teeth, and thank goodness we don't have many cemeteries here or I'd probably give those a wide berth at night too. But how, o how could you ever compare Rowling to the travesty that is Meyer? Why did you release this statement? Why are you talking about her at all? Why are you making her legit with your own (hard-won) street cred? Alack, alas, alorn - I will never get those 12 hours of my life back that I spent reading the series. Now all I can do is dissuade people from reading the crap. Libellés : books ["Stephen King says ‘Twilight’ author ‘can't write’] |
mercredi, février 04, 2009 Pebbles in the roadblock to environmental-friendly living  I never thought that the road to sustainable living would be achieved through big sweeping measures. It's always the small choices that add up - small choices such as bringing your own bags when you do grocery shopping, or choosing locally-grown food that doesn't carry as many carbon credits, or recycling paper.I'm a massive supporter of the last option. There's always a lot of paper waste being generated in the office - you have misprints, paper jams, fax spam (a LOT of fax spam gets sent to our offices), old printouts that have been discarded, drafts and the like - and a lot of times, information is printed on one side, while the other goes blank, crying out to be re-used. Re-using paper should be easy. You grab the hunk of paper, put it in a tray, and the printer spits out yet another draft of that essay you're working on, and hey there! Your environmental conscience is assuaged a little bit. But things are never so easy, are they? Our office printer hates recycled paper. Just hates it. Detests it with a vengeance. Using recycled paper results in paper jams like you would not believe - staff are always risking some limb or other attempting to retrieve the jammed sheet. And even then, sometimes the jams are in obscure corners of the photocopier (we rent one of those huge monstrosities that print-fax-scan-copy), which means time wasted trying to figure out which nook or cranny you need to yank out that last bit of torn-off paper from. When I first started work here, I put the recycled paper in Tray 2 - which prompted jammed when all the fresh paper in Tray 1 (the default tray) was used up. This happened twice before a very frustrated colleague (thankfully still possessing all of his/her fingers) finally yelled out "Please don't put recycled paper in the trays! Use the bypass tray!" You would think that the bypass tray would be more hardy - after all, there (theoretically) should be one less roller to pass through since the bypass tray does not allow double-sided printing. But no - the machine jams time and again, and our paper accordian pile grows while I stare at it unhappily. The increasing frequency of the appearance of paper accordians has resulted in the death knell rally for this attempt at environmental-friendliness at the office: "haiyah, just use fresh paper la!" My life is a strange series of parallels, because that's what my father recently told my mother - to stop using recycled paper to print from our home printer, because the printer kept jamming every two pages.(Personally, I just think that it's just a problem with the HP printer being over its warranty period that's causing the problem - technology murphy's law: once its over its warranty, it fritzes out on you.) It's incidents like these that dissuade the enthusiastic environmentalist in us. Small things - interrupting your workflow during the day, creating family conflicts at home. We need environmentally-conscious engineers to build and design an energy-efficient photocopier-printer which loves recycled paper. It should be hardy, and not fussy about what paper weight/type gets fed into it - its sole purpose in life is to eat whatever gets fed to it, and spit out whatever needs printed on it. Anyone up to the challenge? Libellés : humanitarian, personal, technology [Pebbles in the roadblock to environmental-friendly living] |
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Dr. Martin Luther King Jr: the Jericho Road “[W]e are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”(1)Recently, a number of conversations I've had centre around why I'm doing what I'm doing, or why do I bother with a job which pays a whole hunk of change less than what I could possibly earn in some other job which I am qualified to do. It's not particularly easy to explain to a society which does not really privilege ideals over the economic pragmatism of living life in Singapore - techno-crazy, expensive Singapore. I'm convinced that people would be a lot more happy, and we'd have a much healthier country (and world), if more people did what they liked to do. Not to say that we all slack off, of course - the Protestant Work Ethic does expound that work is good for the soul (although I won't go as far as seeing financial wealth as a mark of personal salvation.) The issues that drive each country towards wealth or poverty are diverse and always complex, often intermingled with other issues which intersect other concerns, which stem from a cornucopia of other problems that the populace faces. Charity starts at home: that initial flinging of the coin to a beggar. But it is only when we stand back and look at the entire edifice, as King puts it, will we see the crowds, and have compassion [Matt. 14:14]. I think I've seen the edifice, and it scares me. It brings to mind the Breton Fisherman's Prayer, which JFK kept as a plaque on his desk [2] :  But it doesn't mean we don't try. [2] JFK Library Online Libellés : christian, personal, thinking [Dr. Martin Luther King Jr: the Jericho Road] |
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