It was Climate Action Day at NUS yesterday. This year, it’s also more commonly known as the Day of No Rubbish Bins. That’s because the organizers, for the strangest and most inane reasons, felt that rubbish bins have something to do with climate. The action this year was to remove all (or most) rubbish bins around campus, and this is supposed to create awareness about our climate and environment. Yeah, right. It is working, because we’re now all so indignant…
Sometimes I feel very worried about the computing students we’re getting in my school. Yet at the same time I’m amazed at how we could achieve the top spot in Asia and 12th position worldwide in the Computer Science and Information Systems Rankings 2011 (2011 QS World University Rankings). Some of the users, both students and even some staff, that I had the opportunity to interact with leave me in utter shock that they could belong to computer science school.
At the risk of sounding like I’m technophobic, distrustful of the Internet, and terrified of online money transactions… I am indeed starting to find online banking and online payments rather worrisome to some extent. It’s not that I’m afraid of online banking or online payments. I’ve been living on the Internet for long enough, I’ve done banking online and shopped online for some time. But a couple of bad experiences this year has got me thinking that some of these…
Then, after installing Gentoo Linux yesterday, today I had a go at Ubuntu. This time, instead of a spare PC, I installed it in a virtual machine in my MacBook Pro. I know, this is hardly a fair comparison, but let’s just hear me out, because I’m just totally awed by the setup experience. It was just so easy, even considering my increased expectations of how Linux distributions ought to have become.
I spent a part of today installing Gentoo Linux in a spare PC. If you’ve not heard of it, Gentoo is yet another Linux distribution. It stands out from the rest in that practically everything you install is actually compiled from source code locally. It’s not my first experience with Gentoo… I had a go at it when it was newly launched around 2002. It’s a hacker’s distribution. Not very much fun, and if you asked me, I wouldn’t want…
Sometimes, I think “work-life balance” is just an excuse for some people who want to work less. Push away their work. Shirk responsibility. I’m not against the idea of needing some balance, in principle. But one must also realize that every person is a valuable resource in an organization, and they need to do their fair part. It’s not a question of working “over time”. I recently spoke to some people who talked about how they come on the dot,…
I have unintentionally become an expert at installing and reinstalling Windows. It’s Windows XP this time. This is my third Windows XP installation in two days, before I finally got a problematic program running correctly. It’s a silliness with software compatibility. It’s the year 2010, and Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 is standard. But no, this problematic program isn’t compatible with MSIE8. It isn’t even compatible with MSIE7. It needs MSIE6.
I didn’t think the YOG intended any courtesy in their Give Way sign. My suggestion to “Please give way” was moot. It’s now officially “Give Way or Give Me $130″.
16. At least. Sixteen! That’s for academics! It’s not a big building. There are only just 4 storeys (and one basement). It’s not a maze. It’s just a rather longish building. There are only two stairwells. But it seems, some academics need, or believe they need, 16 directional signs to locate a single room on the 4th storey of the building.
For about a week now, Google Maps has been rather confused about where I am. It fixes me at a specific spot in Bukit Batok, when in reality I’m like 10km away, in an area also wrongly labeled as Pulau Bukom in the zoomed out map view. There’s nothing wrong with the GPS. It’s the way location is determined from cell tower information. For a while, though, I sent myself on a wild goose chase wondering if my dabbling with…
