i.justrealized

New year’s coming and I am excited that I am going older a year. This year has been particularly fruitful. I completed most of what I set to achieve. Here’s a rough status:

• On religion, I ascertain my religious stance. I am neither theist nor atheist. I found out about the word “ignostic” (or theological noncognitivism) and felt it describes the thoughts that are forming from 2008 to now and I learn that I am not alone.
• On consumption, I have deeper appreciation on the finer things. I learnt to enjoy coffee in its bitter form. I finally got it.
• On living, I am slowly discovering what my motto in life is. It’s kind of flaky and I should not discuss it now. I feel a lot of decisions that I make or do not make is based on this narrative. While it differs from most people, I found peace in that statement and that everything will be okay if I continue to invest my options towards that goal.
• On work, I quit ONG&ONG because I got too comfortable. I never realized I crave for uncertainty that much. I traded stability for excitement. It’s the first step to reprioritize myself. I look forward to 2012.
• On clothes, I am more willing to try out something less conservative. I wanted to believe that there is a perfect form of fashion but this is perhaps fundamentally incorrect. I am confident that nearly no one has any idea if a set of apparel and accessories is matching. It depends on the person having the confidence to pull off the most ridiculous of combinations.
• On verbal and written communication, I could do better. I should work on this more in 2012. I tend to be misunderstood.
• On health, I am less healthy than before. I will go to the gym more. Oh and by the way, I somewhat concluded that the most important thing in life cannot be health. Anyway who claims that haven’t thought through the subject sufficiently. If you believe in that and you aren’t a health product salesman please let me pull you out of this disillusion. Call me.
• On music, I like fusion jazz and electro swing more. And Nicki Minaj of course. I got a pair of Marshall headphones this year and it is best investment this year. Thank you Joanne.
• On people, I grew less skeptic and less protective of myself this year. Am I just waiting to be hurt really badly? Maybe. People are kinder to me this year — empirical evidence of something done right.

See you next year.

In the cover of Dec 05, 2011 issue of The New Yorker, memorabilia takes more space than actual books. Is this a likely future for bookstores?

[Condé Nast, The New Yorker Digital Edition / Dec 05, 2011.]

I am not interested at all. No unsubscribe option. Do I have to call SingTel specially to request for a delist? I have received numerous SMSes on that. Oh and the customized ringtones? Oh god they are annoying. Why did SingTel even think I would appreciate them changing to some song I never heard before? I just want the lousy default dial tone that is really really boring because it tells so much of my personality. Thank you.

On altruism, Professor Judith Lichtenberg (Philosophy at Georgetown University) explains…

Common sense tells us that some people are more altruistic than others. Egoism’s claim that these differences are illusory — that deep down, everybody acts only to further their own interests — contradicts our observations and deep-seated human practices of moral evaluation.

Altruists should not be confused with people who automatically sacrifice their own interests for others. We admire Paul Rusesabagina, the hotel manager who saved over 1,000 Tutsis and Hutus during the 1994 Rwandan genocide; we admire health workers who give up comfortable lives to treat sick people in hard places. But we don’t admire people who let others walk all over them; that amounts to lack of self-respect, not altruism.

Altruism is possible and altruism is real, although in healthy people it intertwines subtly with the well-being of the agent who does good. And this is crucial for seeing how to increase the amount of altruism in the world. Aristotle had it right in his “Nicomachean Ethics”: we have to raise people from their “very youth” and educate them “so as both to delight in and to be pained by the things that we ought.”

Source: New York Times

I just returned from national service reservist. Singapore practices conscription for abled men. The reservist programme aims to train military personnel to become operational ready should there be a need in time to come.

The disruption of my daily routine irks me. The regimentation and senseless babbling of army commanders returns. To kick start the commander phase of battalion, one of my commanders proclaimed something along the lines of “You guys are not a reservist unit, you are an active unit.” That discourages and puzzles me to a good extend (since we are a reservist unit). The overzealous nature of that commander gave me a bitter preview of what is to come.

Today is October 16, it’s the 6th day. This programme will end on the October 29 if nothing goes wrong. That’s 13 days to go.

I saw this in the TODAY paper:

NEA fine overly harsh?

05:55 AM Oct 09, 2010

About two weeks ago, my sister and her group of friends gathered at the East Coast Park to celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival.

They lit candles on a park table but their guileless fun cost them a fine of $500 by two officers from the National Environment Agency. In my opinion, these youngsters should have been let off with a warning as they were first-time offenders. The group cleaned the table afterwards. Was there a need for such a harsh punishment to be meted out?

Letter from Joyce Koh

[via TODAY]

While it is indeed wrong to light candles on a park table, a $500 fine is a little too much. It’s nothing to do with the offenders being youngsters, there shouldn’t be a student subsidy for fines. Lighting candles in park during Mid-Autumn Festival is no longer a common occurrence as compared to, say, ten years ago. Either people are less interested in the Festival or that they’re understanding that they are vandalizing public property.

I wouldn’t want someone to light candles on the table in my house. I would be even more offended if someone lights candles on my wooden table and leave the melted wax for me to clean. Incidentally most people do not clean up the candle wax after they are done having fun watching the candles melt in the parks. No one brings a utility knife for such occasions to scrap the wax off. Perhaps the authorities are concerned over this form of littering.

A punishment is justifiable but $500 probably isn’t. Perhaps some sort of mandatory community work would be a better punishment. As for the wax on the table, yes, get them to clean them up with a electrical iron and some paper.

One thing that I notice with Amazon EC2 when trying out their micro instances in Singapore (Asia Pacific) is that the round trip takes approximately 250 ms from United States. This made me reconsidered a little about having my instance hosted in the Asia Pacific region since a majority of my visitors remain to be US-based.

I originally planned to use Amazon EC2′s micro instance to do just host a few blogs. Most of my images from the blogs are hosted at Amazon S3 already and I felt like moving everything over to Amazon’s US East facility (North Virginia).

Amazon EC2 offering is slightly cheaper than Rackspace Cloud’s similar offering and is quite attractive. A huge plus would be that I can host it in Singapore but then that’s probably benefiting just me. I can probably blog faster if it is hosted in Singapore but, to be honest, I wouldn’t really want to blog more than my current rate.

Recently Rackspace had some issues with my host machine and my server instance kept freezing up over a month. I didn’t suspect it could be an issue on their side and up the memory in my instance to 1024 MB. When that didn’t help, I almost wanted to migrate to another host — Linode. Now there’s Amazon’s micro instance I’m really spoilt for choice.