Youtube

As one of the most popular websites, Youtube has always been serving as the main Internet platform in video uploading and broadcasting in most countries. In other context, it is the website where most of the Internet users are searching for audio-visual information. The user community has been growing steadily after several implementations of introducing a dynamic, user friendly, interactive interface. At the same time, the users can easily stay connected with video producers via subscriptions. Although Youtube is not a social network like Facebook, it is still obliged to take care of this large community and control the privacy, harmony and benefits of the community.

I don't know if I'm an active user of Youtube. I watched a lot of videos. I have an account but I rarely subscribe to any channels or providing feedbacks via leaving comment. At the same time, I don't bother to like or dislike a video at all. However I do observe how the community has been abusing their right regarding their freedom of speech. It is fascinating yet surprising to notice how easily human beings can be so juvenile, ignorant and abusive when they are granted the anonymity. And here comes the main point of this post. I would like to leave my opinions here concerning the way Youtube has been changing its feedback-providing system from what I slightly observed.

Once upon a time, Youtube was practicing a rating system which people normally called "five-star rating system". For example, if there were two groups of similar number of users rated 3 stars and 4 stars each, an average rating of 3.5 stars would be shown below the video. After that, this rating system was changed to what I called "bar rating system". Users were allowed to like or dislike a video without being given a scale to rate a video. The numbers of likes and dislikes were accumulated and displayed by two bars of green and red to show the video viewers a comparison. Now, Youtube has altered the "bar rating system". Only numbers of likes and dislikes are shown instead.

Before continue elaborating on my point of views, I would really like to determine the actual purpose of implementing a rating system. Groups of users can be differentiated in term of their interest, video making experience and so on. Some users would like to know how good their videos are made from the ratings given, while some of them are not interested to know the rating because they just share videos to close friends or relatives without editing. I don't know if we can completely disable all the rating and feedback in a video. At the moment, I would like to link the rating system to another website, The Internet Movie Database (IMDb). The website is proving a wide information of filmed movies with great and active response from the audience community. Instead of "five stars rating system", they maintain a "ten stars rating system" to improve on the rating sensibility of how worthy a movie should be watched. A rating system like this would be very useful, beneficial and appreciated with some reviews available at the same time. Back to Youtube, not many videos are filmed or made to entertain people in the same way as those commercial movies. Sometimes I just do not feel the necessity to have a rating system on Youtube, when I have no idea which parameter I should follow to rate a video featuring some bad news. It is the team of Youtube to decide which interactive elements to be maintained or to get rid of.

The above picture illustrates a "troll face"

Have you heard of "troll"? You might have met with trolls but not knowing they are referred as trolls. In Internet slang, troll is someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous or off-topic messages in an online community. These people are almost everywhere. The bigger the population of an online community, the bigger the population of such trolls in the community as well. Why do I mention a new term here? Well, let's conduct some trials. Try to surf on Youtube to find as many videos with a moderate number of view counts as you can. You would be able track the trace of such a trolling activity when a video has been uploaded for a period of time until a troll can actually reach the site. And here comes their favourite agenda - giving some ridiculously juvenile and irrelevant remarks and a dislike, or more than a dislike if the troll has multiple accounts. You can hardly find a video with no dislikes, even if it is featuring sheer artistic performance. Under the same analogy, they would rate for the lowest star if possible, when they do not feel comfortable with the growing view counts and relatively high rating stars of a video. Perhaps you don't even know "Baby" by Justin Bieber has set a new record by collecting the greatest number of dislikes - about twice the number of likes. Do people really hate him so much?

Let alone the trolls. We cannot eliminate them as they are abusing their rights legally. Any democratic platforms are bound to these trolls. But certain actions can be taken to curb their activity. I recommend Youtube to remove the dislike buttons. By the way, what is the point to have this function? If we dislike someone, we don't express ourselves by telling him "hey dude, I dislike you." Instead, a preferred action would be telling him which aspect we would hope him to reflect on or change. Dislike is way too negative. This function could potentially harbour a community accompanied with hatred, jealousy and discouraging environment. I would agree to preserve the dislike button if it can bring a constructive means even without the presence of trolls. If you are thinking that you want to preserve the dislike button because you can take a look at its number while deciding if you want to spend your time watching the video, why don't you take a look at the numbers of view counts and likes, since trolling might give you a false feedback, assuming trolling does not target its positive feedback? In my humble opinion, the percentage of people who liked a video is enough for us to decide if a video should be watched. Thus, my another recommendation for Youtube would be showing the percentage, for instance, 25 out of 1000 people who watched the video have liked the video, thus giving a percentage of 2.5%.

It would not be wise to disable all comments in all videos due to trolling as we still need some constructive responses. At least inappropriate comments can still be flagged, reported and hid from public. By the way, if a video is really featuring something we don't like, personally I don't think it is a must to express ourselves. We have to accept the fact that having the urge to express such a dislike or negative sentimental thoughts to something is actually lack of self-cultivation, and being angry is an emotional penalty to no one other than ourselves. We just need to be moderate to build a harmony community.

Relativity

This post is just something I figure out and find it interesting to share with. It might make some sense to relate basic scientific facts to our life.

Imagine there is a container with gas particles moving inside it randomly but following the fundamental laws of motion. They are atoms and molecules, the building blocks of any other complexes. Not going into too much scientific details, we know any atom would consist of subatomic particles such as proton, electron and neutron. In higher academic level, scholars divide these particles into quarks and leptons, and so on whenever new discoveries are made, possibly to be smaller than any scale we could ever imagine. In a simple way to draw up a conclusion, no matter how small the particles are, still, they are masses that occupy space, and undergo motions or are relatively stationary at any split second under the fixed ways they behave as one part of this world.

By understanding mass-energy equivalency, we know that our universe is at a dynamic environment yet constantly conserving its potential as a mass or energy as motion. By understanding Newton's first law, we can say an object would travel in a straight line with constant velocity or would not move provided no external force is exerted. I'm not going to give more examples of laws as it has clearly shown that the masses follow the rule, and this is the law of nature, which wouldn't change. No matter how complex a system is, none of the small mass could choose to defy these laws. In fact, they don't have the "ability" to "choose", they just obey whatever laws that are fixed.

Imagine a simple electrical circuit is set up by using copper wires, batteries and a light bulb. It would be complex enough to just look at the part of copper wire when the circuit is completed. There are multitude number of electrons moving at different velocities at any instant because each single electron would be situated at a totally different situation which is a combination of forces pushing or pulling the electron by different factors, such as electric field, magnetic field, gravitational field and so on. People do not normally take care of such a complexity as it is unnecessary to do so because by convention, any measurement is made under an error and uncertainty that may be omitted. It is impossible to be done as no super computer can handle such an intense calculation too. Thus, an ammeter that reads at particular sensitivity and accuracy will get the job done easier.

And the examples shown above derive from non-living things. This post would be a solely low level, not-so-precise and physics related academic post in general terminologies if I stop writing here. So I would like to relate the above statements to our life.

Living organisms, undergo movement and locomotion under controlled. In the kingdom of Animalia, if I'm not mistaken, all organisms have a nervous system controlled by the neuronal activity integrated organ called brain. The influx of sodium ions into the axon as well as the attachment of neurotransmitters into the receptors happening at synaptic cleft, which is the small gap between two neurons illustrate the simple concept of how the messages are being transmitted in the form of electrical pulses in these animals especially in human. No one knows exactly how our brains work, although some achievements have been made in brain researches to successfully identify different regions of brain separated by its functionality. It is even more complicated when we try to figure out and analyse how human mind works based on what the human population has understood at the perspective of science and logic.

Each human motion is controlled by the brain, the extremely complicated network of synapses and neurons with electrical messages being transmitted all time long. If I relate the natural law of motions into every mass included in this nervous system, and if and only if it is true, we, the human beings, are a set of combined masses, which obey the fixed laws, and cannot be changed by itself! Thus, the human motion is itself a natural act, controlled by the mind, which is an abstract representative of a network of "masses" that act naturally. Thus I would say, with each act that we have done, and act that we will have it done in the future, our life has been indirectly fixed, just like the way the laws are fixed. You might argue that we could change our mind anytime and refute this theory. As I've mentioned, each act, including changing our mind, is still being "controlled" by the neuronal activity, that would not "change" by itself. It is included.

Life is not just about an individual matter. It is the world, the interactions between people, the abiotic factors and biotic factors, the history and so on. We think, perceive, learn, and develop our mindset, and this is even more complex than the description of previous paragraph. Thus, I would symbolise every person as a mass, the influencing power as its inertia, and the historical background and abiotic factors as different fields, and there ends up being a mixture of content under different motions, following the laws! You could say, in a pessimistic way, that we cannot change what would happen in the future. Our fate and destiny has been written. Of course we can say we would fail the test without study, and we would have chosen to do that if we wanted. But now we have passed the test, and it happened out of many possible outcomes, but what happened is only that happened. There is only one result. If we shift the timeline to before the test, and it wouldn't be wrong to propose "no matter how your result is, it is fixed." This is an act, a happening, symbolised by the vector and magnitude of motion of a mass after a "collision".

So hereby I suggest a new relativity, the relativity of natural relation between each aspect stated above, and no matter what it is. Of course this is not fully a professional proposal and I'm just an ordinary student of age 19 who has only completed his A-Level course. This is definitely a theory with loopholes and flaws. But I just couldn't help to share this as it is really interesting.

And at some point, I believe it is true =)

Censored

This is how the front cover page of TIME magazine gazetted in the first week of October should be.

I received it. But it has been censored by marker pen.

Respect our name

It has been a long time since I noticed quite a number of my friends have preferred people to address them by their own coined nickname. In my opinion it has nothing wrong to have a nickname for better recognition among newly met friends, as long as it is related to your abbreviation of your name, your character, your appearance and others. For example, my name is Jin Xiang. Some of my Malay friends find it hard to pronounce words starting with the alphabet "X", so I always recommend them to address me in the way they pronounce "Siang" in Malay language. Both of the words are homonym, moreover the word "Siang" brings the meaning of morning in their language. Some of my Indian friends have long names, so they abbreviate it.

Normally Chinese names would not appear to be too long nor too complicated. It usually consists of three words - rarely two or four, and the first word is the surname that enables you to track back your origins and the line of ancestors. For instance, my full name is Lui Jin Xiang, a typical Chinese name that does not fit into the first and last name system existing in Europe because people tend to relate first name to surname. In order to show my Chinese name as Lui Jin Xiang, it is a must to give my name by Lui as last name. We show respect to our ancestors, so we don't put it behind. So, for me it is a little annoying to categorise my surname as last name.

Perhaps you don't know, or even some of the Chinese don't even feel the importance and underlying obligation to be proud of your surname as well as your name given by your parents. It shows a good example of how influential it can be, when we come across with some historical facts of some heroes sharing the same surname with us did something great, we would feel glad and honored. How if that person had been notorious? We would really feel guilty and sorry for him. There lies an invisible link among Chinese of same surname. How about the name given by your parents? Do you think it does not carry any meaning? Or they had not been considerate enough to give you a unique name you desire?

And here comes the main point of updating this post. I do wonder what the motive of getting an unnecessary nickname is. I have no comment on people who changed their names because of some beliefs and religious needs. I guess every Christian would need to add an English name in front of their surnames for the reason I have not discovered. However sometime I sense that several of those who changed their names, either in a formal or informal way, have shown disrespect to their own identities and sheer western advocacy. Maybe you don't like to live with your current name because it is too common, fine, reflect on what you have omitted, feel obligated and rectify it. The reason is simple. It is your identity granted by your parents! Appreciate the only naming system that conserves you and your ancestors' identity relations.

Untitled (You may suggest one.)

Perhaps I shouldn't have concerned too much. Perhaps I should respond to all unpleasant sight by just a smile, and stay happy because it actually favors us. No criticism, no so called "harsh comments" or "inappropriate action". Perhaps I shouldn't have placed my perspective of views in equal to those, which in turn would easily spark some misunderstandings. Perhaps I should be one of those saying: "Aiya, like that one la, why care so much?" Or perhaps I should just remain silent, be your obedient students and get focused in term of academic attention, score a string of As in examination, or try to secure the top in the world award to appease them before flying to India, then leave here and be happy ever after.

But I don't. To refrain myself from the urges to share something neglecting its fact as either positive or negative has been something more difficult than to keep my mouth shut. Some people don't understand the fascinating and intriguing part we could indulge ourselves in during arguing against a statement or topic by contributing constructive thoughts, and have a great assimilation of others' thoughts, so that things can eventually end up obtaining a valuable outcome. Curiosity and sense of accomplishment are playing a main role. People tend to lost the interest concerned in the sense that he doesn't prefer to share his very personal piece of two cents could be a result of flawed environment he was being brought up. For example, the repeating cliche during constructing an essay without really trying to inject some fresh ideas whenever possible, could curb his sharing ability.

When something has been done with a large margin of improvement, I speak. When I saw something flawed or wrong, I speak. Before I speak, I do something which most of the people don't, that is I reflect on whether I'm trying to contribute to, or encourage the flawed or to the wrong. At the same time, we can't dispute the fact if we don't stay in the flawed, we are the ones who face disadvantages. It can be a hard time to balance everything during this stage, but this is what prepares us to have equipped all of the traits needed in order to push ourselves to a further level of aptitude in the future.

We can choose to show indifference towards the flawed, because of "it is none of my business, as long as I happy, it doesn't matter." or "I can't do much to change that, don't let myself to get into trouble, so just let it be." Here is a question to think: Are we entitled to do so? And here comes a good lesson to learn - to be able to achieve the goal with minimum arousal of less significant circumstances which might in turn lead to a complication that may defeat the purpose of the initial intention. Expect the unexpected and accept the unacceptable. Which one do you choose?

No, I don't prefer this one.

This question can be interesting, how does your seat in your current college or university look like? Do you feel comfortable with the designated lecture hall or classroom you enter every weekday and spend hours of time dealing with the new syllabus or enduring the sleep-inducing tone by your lecturers? I guess everyone of you have no problem recognising the "tuition chair" ( I couldn't find any suitable word to name it. ) with the small flipping board. Yes, it is small, and brings a lot of unpleasant moment whenever I am to sit on it, which in turn urges me to voice out my personal opinion regarding this popular facility provided throughout the Malaysia.

Honestly, when I was a primary school kid, I was sick of sticking myself on the old wooden table with drawer and chair whole day long. At the same time, I used to have a funny thought that sitting on the tuition chair must be very comfortable, cool-looking or any adjective that describes something good.

Now I realise the chair doesn't bring as much joy as I expected. The main aspect that fails to withdraw my affinity towards the chair is the small flipping board, or perhaps I should call it the small pad. All of us bring our pencil box during lesson, and thanks to the small area that cannot even accommodate a normal textbook, our pencil box would always end up laying on the floor beneath the chair.

It drives me mad whenever I'm trying to solve any question with the aid of a calculator. There is no sufficient space to get calculator a good spot, but to place it above the paper. I come out with a good solution to avoid the calculator blocking the text in paper, that is to place it on my thighs. And at this time you can pay attention using your ears. Trust me, occasionally there will be sound of calculator hitting the ground as a result of falling down, and after that I know how strong our calculator is to withstand the impact and remain intact after collision, nice quality control, Casio.

Actually every invention would come in handful in particular aspect. The tuition chair can serve better, but not in KTT. I prefer sitting on an ordinary chair, having ample space to have my work done comfortably on an ordinary table. Hah, just a personal rambling, do tell me if you have the same feeling :p

The hectic and memorable holidays

I have been relatively busy throughout these weeks as well as holidays. Make it short, my friends and I in Kolej Teknologi Timur are having a hard time preparing the first activity under the name of newly formed Chinese Cultural Education Society (CCES), which is the Chinese New Year celebration. Even when I'm now approximately 700km away from my college, I still have to compete with fast-running time to have my "homework" done and bring it back to Sepang.

I am the one leading the work related to decoration. I couldn't help scratching my forehead while trying to figure out a full plan concerning how the main hall which doesn't look like a hall at all, should be decorated. Certain artworks cannot fit to the framework of my initial planning due to limitations such as those pillars obstructing the vision towards the stage (actually there is no stage) and the extremely low ceiling. As I mentioned, my college is actually further modified and equipped from shops on an incline plane, so you can imagine the main hall consists of four lots of different height interconnected by staircases of three to four levels. I can even knock my head on the ceiling if I jump forcefully, no kidding.

We are going to get ourselves a formal exhibition displaying Chinese culture as well as Chinese New Year tradition. I searched and gathered the information needed using days and it took me another week to complete thirty slides of PowerPoint and those A3 size papers would be printed in full colour. At the same time I had to complete more than 20 pairs of spring couplets. It was overwhelming tired.

When there is motion, there is also friction. Thing doesn't come as smooth as we wish. 24th is the day of CNY celebration, however those inconsiderate allocate some candidates to take their internal examination until one day before 24th, that means we don't really own enough time to put on our decorative stuff in the main hall. It is even saddening and disastrous to receive the order calling us to take off our red tassels which had been set on ceiling before holidays. I am fairly annoyed and irritated, but what can I do?

Besides, I need to spare some time to manage my another private blog written in Chinese. Not to mention it is now the time I have to cope with the A2 syllabus. Much effort should be invested. Nevertheless, I still enjoy keeping myself busy with this activity. It somehow brings reminiscence of days I was busy with willingly committed activities during my secondary school life.

Honestly, I am starting a new relationship, my first relationship. I guess my family wouldn't even know that until they reach this line in my blog. Yes, we had a great time despite the fact I could hardly choose a time to hang out with her as I needed to respond to some gathering invitations. People were intrigued as I changed my relationship status on my Facebook profile. I would have revealed her identity if I wished to and I just hope everything can behave and go naturally =)

After this I would upload certain photos of this, or perhaps photos of my girlfriend and I =)

Randomly arranged? Designed?

Note: I would like to apologize for not being able to convey my thoughts precisely due to my limited access towards the terminologies involved and scarce proficiency in the language used. Ignore the syntax errors, and try to broaden your mindset to walk with me. This article is not written under the intention of offending nor challenging any believers that hinge to the conviction that our world is created by the only entity namely God. I find it fairly intriguing when I recently discovered I do have some points to raise in response to religious topics which I never really concerned.

To which extent do you believe our world is perfectly designed? You would be indoctrinated by tonnes of preaches convincing you the “truth” since childhood if born in a family held tightly to Christianity. You might question what you had been perceiving, or you might not. Most of those converted clearly understand the conflict they experienced that you might not. To those holding fideism, which compartmentalizes reason and faith, and believes merely on faith, believe or not, the argument that seemed as solid as rock to you has been an object of ridicule in some others eyes, mostly allegedly you may guess, but you should also be careful it is possible that the one with blindfold might not necessarily be those defying your faith.

In this article I focus only on the aspect whether the premise “world is created and perfectly designed” could be a strong argument. In certain books, some experts including scientists pointed out that the discoveries of science are actually in the direction of proving the existence of an intelligent creator. Cosmology, biology, physics and many other fields related on the basis of science are actually contributing to the conviction of theism, according to them. For example, the human genes, the biological molecules are miraculously coordinated. The laws of physics are designed such that the integrative complexity could be resolved using mathematics and logics. No one could explain why the speed of light must be approximately 300000000 metre per second. In similar context, they infer all of these behave beyond the naturalistic explanation. It is unnatural, where there is no chance to have the same situation happening if random ways are to replace it.

They always amaze us by using probability to show us how impossible it could be if random way goes. Yes, random nature is the point I advocate. You tell me in order for the human DNA to function properly, it takes certain probability to account for the systematic and perfect matches by monomers namely nucleotides, and to be able to synthesis proteins using amino acids, so it takes another probability. It goes on until how these biological molecules interact with each other, how the blood clotting mechanism is, how systems in a human body work by calculating the probabilities, and deducing it is almost impossible that human stays alive! You could have told someone, look, the probability is one over ten to the power of integer with astronomical number of digits behind, it is approaching zero, so the world we are living is not randomly arranged! You got a point, I have come across with a lot of so called evidences such as “do you know that if the earth is orbiting slightly nearer or further to the sun, the earth would be either too hot or too cold to sustain life? How amazing!” or “if the universe is expanding at a rate that is a little faster or slower, we could not have a universe that would be capable of supporting life!” They are indeed amazing, but to me it makes no sense to support theism.

People often attribute the fine-tuned universe we are living to the mighty creation by the god simply because it provides a better explanation where science has failed to do so, especially to explain the origin of universe and life. Now try to reflect on the probability. Let say something will happen by the chance of 1/100000000. When it does happen, can we say “99999999 circumstances have failed, and the one happening is right beside us.”? The same logic goes on if you insist to use probability. You say “our universe is created by god because it is fine-tuned!”, why can’t I say “according to your probability 1/N to have such a fine-tuned universe, we can have equal number N-1 of not-fine-tuned universes besides the one we have!”? Isn’t that there are more chances to have something not happening than just happening? As you know universe is vast, who knows there are universes in other dimensions of realms with more physical elements other than just time, space and matter? It could just happen =)

Thank you for finishing my rambling, sorry if you felt offended or annoyed, but that is truly what atheists think, and they may have the same feeling when you say "yours is the wrong one."

Not to forget to thank SuSu my senior who borrowed me the book "The Case For A Creator", I learned a lot =)

Stop!

This is something I concern but hasn't been shared in my blog. As an average Internet user, I'm sure you would have come across all kinds of forwarded emails from your friends including love stories, friendship interactive pieces, news, something hilarious such as links of videos and photos, or chain letter the cynical hoax and others.

Yesterday there came an email titled "Stop the killing of seals!" with some bloody photos attached and condemnation in response to human's cruelty towards the innocent, defenseless animals. I did receive the email of the same theme several weeks ago, with title "Stop whaling!".

Even if you are not a biology student, you are having no problem to figure out the similarity that whales and seals share. Yes they are endangered, going to be categorised as extinct animals soon. Personally I support what some humanitarian organisations are currently in their endless attempt to eradicate barbarism, urging the leaders of the world to show concern and response.

But ironically most of us are consumers in term of feeding. Not all of us are vegetarians. I had just found out actually there are more chickens than human population in the world. We don't take the slaughtered chickens, fishes or whatever belong to livestock as example because they are numerous and hardly to go extinct. If you are patient enough to reach this sentence, I hope you have got the point I'm going to raise. What is the difference of human cruelty despite the fact above? What defines cruel? Does the image of whaling overlap your sight when you visited market places, watching how the fishes got their head off?

If possibly chicken is on the verge to extinct, email titled "Stop slaughtering chicken!" would probably be spreading throughout the world.

Standing on the cross road

When I was in standard one of primary school, my teacher gave us a task – to figure out what possible jobs we would like to strive for, and fill in a form by arranging them in sequence according to our preference. Besides writing essay titled “My Ambition”, it has always been a trend among the teachers conducting such a survey to their students, for the reasons you know why. As expected, doctor topped the list as every one of us was looking for the most prestigious title. Yes, we were proud of ourselves to have our own preliminary ambition.

During secondary study, we had to face the fact that finding a job in response merely to our own interest would not eventually pay off. Who don’t wish to get himself into something that he really likes? But there are just too much factors we hadn’t considered. I would like to point out the main considerations taken care while people are looking for a job again, other than just the affinity towards the job – social status and respect, monetary stability, job satisfaction, or more simply to be simple and secure and so on.

For instance, my college has always been nurturing the doctor-to-be and dentist-to-be. I did ask the scholars around me concerning the reason they decide their career prospect to work as a dentist in their future. So far the answers I got are what you could always have expected. I’m able to bring it to a small conclusion, as it is two-fold. They prefer to traverse into a health care related field but they don’t seem to have considerable interest in this. A simple question will do – do you like watching into people’s mouth? Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean to expect an answer “yes”, I’m just wondering about what people tend to grow an interest in. Honestly I haven’t come across with anyone who can give me the powerful evidence that there would be no other job more suitable for him than a dentist. They have no idea about what else they should be. In fact, too many choices are available, which would trap them in the mist of puzzlement.

I used to be in the same circumstance. But we did have adequate time to make the right choice, didn’t we?

The day I had forgotten

"Hi Jin Xiang, are you free now?" she phoned me, "Can I have a chat with you?"

"Hi, sure, no problem." I was rather shocked about what brought her to make this sudden call.

"Do you know what day is today?" she asked, smiling. I knew that from her intonation.

"Err..." What a typical question, but it took me about ten seconds before I could only barely break the silence.

"Oh no! Please don't tell me you have forgotten it!" she uttered in dismay.

"Sorry, give me more time to think about that," I replied.

"Okay, now you try to recall, what had you done on the same day of today in last year?"

"Wait a minute, SPM trial examination?"

"No."

"We met each other in the tuition centre?"

"No! I'm kind of disappointed eh, I don't expect you to forget this important day. But obviously you do." She reiterated, "That day eh, you called me in the canteen after school. Then?"

I know she would be glad if I could complete the part she left for me. However I had a short-term memory loss. I kept contemplating.

"You gave me something..."

"Oh!" I cried, "Happy birthday!"

"Yup... how can you forget it?"

*The conversation above ended up with apologies and wishes*

Actually I did consider about her birthday since she asked the first question. But I thought it would be silly if it was not. Honestly, I'm very sensitive to numbers, however it is contradicting to say - I don't surprise to have myself forgetting about that, considering the fact that I don't always give every friend of mine a sincere wish whenever it is the moment they have grown older, not even to my closest friends.

Perhaps I should start writing them down.

The lecturer

Having the top scorers among the international Cambridge A-Level candidates in the world, I thought one of the best colleges in my country, yet maybe also the smallest in size, Kolej Teknologi Timur to have experienced and excellence lecturers but I soon doubted about their credibility to give lecture to the students who will soon pursue advance study in different critical fields at oversea.

Yes, according to the seniors this doesn't appear to be the fundamental problem, and you might find me grumbling against trifles, because the students here could have been depending on themselves to pass the AS and A2 examinations with flying colours. It doesn't matter to have "good" or "bad" lecturers. However in my point of view this has contributed to an intensely unhealthy learning style. Students and lectures should be interactive to enhance understanding. What's the point of repeating the texts in the text book word by word to us? Let alone the sleep-inducing tone, grammatical errors and the way she was speaking English, especially when pronouncing the terminologies. Try to listen to the pronunciation of "mas" in BM and at the same time understand that she was actually trying to say "mass". I'm not going to pinpoint which lecturer I'm complaining about, and I don't mean to degrade the lecturers here, but it is saddening to know that the better lecturers are in charge of bringing the students undergoing 1 year programme up.

I will be going to my first Biology lecture later. I hope it won't end up disappointing myself again. I promise myself not to disappoint my college too :)

Rambling around again

I have never visited a barber shop, not even once. I had my hair cut a couple of hours ago, it was my father who did the job since I was small. He insisted to tidy up my hair so that I can give them a good image on the coming registration day of Kolej Teknologi Timur. I will soon embark on my new journey in a remote but learning-conducive-environment, for a long term of time, rather excited but saddening.

Frankly, I'm a procrastinator and have failed to resist my laziness at most of the time but I'm glad to announce that this will be my 42rd post, on the 42rd day after I started blogging in such an unusual way to me. It has nothing impressive though. I had failed my numerous promises made to myself since I was still a kid, but at least not this time. Can I be true to my word in the next time? Has my English improved? Well, I don't really have a answer. There is still a huge margin for me to improve, not only in this language, it's also my learning method and many other aspects that I had forsaken during the school time chasing for academic excellence blindly.

In this morning when I was driving home, I saw something that annoyed me so much - there was another not civil-minded citizen who opened the car window and simply flung a paper cup outside as if there was a rubbish dump right at the center of the road :(

Rambling

Well, Transformer appears to be a hot topic recently, soon after the movie had been released. I'm not a fanatic fan of Transformer, however I was really amazed by the advanced animating technology by which the animation of the conversion from a vehicle to a robot and vice versa was just awesome!

While I was watching it, there were people around me coughing all the time, I felt rather uncomfortable as the H1N1 epidemic had reached my town area :( However I couldn't find any table or statistics showing the number of the infected victims and also the area of my country via google, maybe my searching skill is terrible.

By the way, I wonder if the aliens or the UFO's would land on the other countries except USA. Yet, it is always the USA military fighting the aliens :D

Nah, just rambling around here, couldn't think about a better topic to be shared with.