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[ January 2008 ] | |
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TCHS 4O 2000 [4o's nonsense] alvinny [2] - csq - edchong jenming - joseph - law meepok - mingqi - pea pengkian [2] - qwergopot - woof xinghao - zhengyu HCJC 01S60 [understated sixzero] andy - edwin - jack jiaqi - peter - rex serena SAF 21SA khenghui - jiaming - jinrui [2] ritchie - vicknesh - zhenhao Others Lwei [2] - shaowei - website links - Alien Loves Predator BloggerSG Cute Overload! Cyanide and Happiness Daily Bunny Hamleto Hattrick Magic: The Gathering The Onion The Order of the Stick Perry Bible Fellowship PvP Online Soccernet Sluggy Freelance The Students' Sketchpad Talk Rock Talking Cock.com Tom the Dancing Bug Wikipedia Wulffmorgenthaler       |
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bert's blog v1.21 Powered by glolg Programmed with Perl 5.6.1 on Apache/1.3.27 (Red Hat Linux) best viewed at 1024 x 768 resolution on Internet Explorer 6.0+ or Mozilla Firefox 1.5+ today's page views: 7 (0 mobile) all-time page views: 3403376 most viewed entry: 18739 views most commented entry: 14 comments number of entries: 1228 page created Mon Jul 21, 2025 00:22:21 |
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- tagcloud - academics [70] art [8] changelog [49] current events [36] cute stuff [12] gaming [11] music [8] outings [16] philosophy [10] poetry [4] programming [15] rants [5] reviews [8] sport [37] travel [19] work [3] miscellaneous [75] |
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- category tags - academics art changelog current events cute stuff gaming miscellaneous music outings philosophy poetry programming rants reviews sport travel work tags in total: 386 |
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- academics - + hamsters - "The Presidents of the USA, Russia and Sri Lanka once got an audience with God, who said He would answer one question from each of them. Bush went first. 'Will there ever be democracy and peace in Iraq?', he asked. God thought for a moment and replied, 'Yes, but not in your lifetime.' Putin went next. 'Will Russia ever be a superpower again?' God thought a bit and announced, 'Yes, but not in your lifetime.' Finally Rajapaksa asked, 'Will there ever be an end to the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka?' God replied instantly, 'Of course! Just not in my lifetime.'" App One Thought of reviving my EPL Tales series for these incidents and more, but thought better due to lack of time. Part of the reason was doing Assignment One for CS3216, the first module I've taken so far with overlapping assignments. It's a Facebook Application to create more Facebook Applications, so if you're on Facebook, have a go! Getting Mr. Ham to model for the app was the hardest part: 
Then it was Photoshop time: 
TA One Got an email out of the blue informing me that I was being assigned to Teaching Assistantship duties, and ended up becoming a TA for CS1101C (Engineers only), which has labs only on Wednesdays, my previously free day. Grr. Was a little concerned about the responsibility, though - I hadn't touched C for quite a while, what if I got bombarded with questions I couldn't solve? 
It turned out that I needn't have bothered. Just over a third turned up, and the eight who did mostly did fine on their own. There was a heartstopping minute when I tried to figure out why ls (or dir for you Windows command prompties) wasn't working for one guy, until I realised that it was because his directory was empty - he had just created his UNIX account. Duh. And getting paid is always nice too.
For the third time on this blog, Happy Birthday to me! If ever there were a time when one realises that the transition from "adolescent" to "adult" must be close to complete, this is it, bonded to the realisation that one cannot be forever young. Well, I hope never to accumulate dignitas such as to preclude the poking of bunnies. Becoming an adult may necessitate one to insist on things are one is not sure about, but not to forget that one is not sure. Perhaps just to remind me that I am in Year Four, I found myself enrolled in CS4102 Technical and Management Training (i.e. teaching assistantship) without being aware of it, and seem to be a CS1101/2C Lab TA. Another addition to the (admittedly rather empty) timetable. Maybe I will like it. Maybe. A video featured in GE1101E: Fizzy Fists of Fury
- changelog - - summary of Pakistani power politics from SN1101E South Asia lecture --------------- * Very minor addition of a few worthy links: The Daily Bunny, since Cute Overload seems to have forgotten about my favourite squishable small furry creature; Tom the Dancing Bug, long overdue; And the Perry Bible Fellowship, which really isn't what it seems. Played bridge with the Chemical Engineering people (who have appropriated the whole Engineering Auditorium as their private bridge room) before breaking for twenty laps in the university pool yesterday. This will not be possible when tutorials begin, sadly. CSQ got a club royal flush in one hand - been a long time since I last saw one. Also bought some raisins for the hamsters to commemorate their surviving for a month. They sure take their time in chewing those up. Strangely no email notification of the tutorial registration results, but I've gotten my preferred slots with the exception of two 8 am tutorial sessions in Weeks 3 and 5. Will try to trade them on Wednesday, but not a big deal. Continued, from last semester: 
Am I serious? 
(Source) You bet. AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.
- programming - Having finally gotten it into my mind to try out Perl on the SOC Zone so kindly set up for me, I got Apache and PHP up and running easily enough (can't say the same for the non-Computing students in the module, not least because they don't have access to the MySOC help pages). Perl wasn't as simple, though, and my heart sank a little when the basic httpd.conf changes didn't work out - the dreaded 500 Internal Server Error greeted me. I will be first to admit that I'm no Linux whiz, and indeed even the command to directly create a file from the command line (cat, don't ask why) eluded me at first; The last time I used any flavour of Unix with regularity was a few semesters back for CS2106 Operating Systems. Finding the temerity (terminity?) of PuTTY not to my liking, I found EngInSite DataFreeware's GUI frontend much friendlier. It didn't have a convenient way to upload files, however, so with some combination of the two I plodded on. Under the assumption that the mod_perl Apache interpreter was a must for running Perl on Apache (no thanks to all my Googles for Apache Perl and the like returning some reference to it), I browsed through the installation procedures (which were written for a clean install of Apache), and decided to seek other avenues. It was about this time that I hit upon the bright idea to inspect the error logs, which I had downloaded once before but turned out empty on my local drive (which I discovered was simply because I didn't have sufficient rights). With vim but not much vigour, I discovered that at least the server had received the requests, but had rejected each and every one of them with "Premature end of script headers, file does not exist, nyeah nyeah nyeah". Checked the line out, and rechecked my Hello World cgi script. Shebangs usr/bin/perl... Hmm... D'oh! It was supposed to be "#!/usr/bin/perl" not "#!usr/bin/perl". One missing forward slash. Refreshed Apache (didn't know if it was necessary, was for my Java stuff last time), and nothing. Read more about mod_perl, downloaded the tar file. Then realised that there was some warning about non-UNIX line endings when developing on Windows platforms. Supposedly dos2unix would fix it, so I dutifully did "dos2unix test.cgi". Didn't work. Tore some more hair. Stared at the mod_perl install options some more. It didn't really have to end up like this, right? Fiddled about with the permissions and config file, then finally hit upon the bright idea of typing in the Hello World script directly, with "cat > test2.cgi". Still zero. Hmm. Oh yes, the permissions for the new file are still default. Changed them, then bingo! Perl lives! So why didn't the dos2unix treatment work? Two reasons: One, I had used it incorrectly. If I had read the man page first, I would have realised that the correct invocation is "dos2unix (inputfile) (outputfile)", and instead I assumed that it would just directly overwrite the original. Two, I think it resets the permissions silently even when the input and output files are the same. Well, that's the hardest over. I don't think I will be tinkering with mod_perl for awhile, even if it does promise to run CGI calls 2000% faster. There's a prize for crashing the server anyway :P 
And the bane of my existence? The invisible carriage return. Two miserable bytes. And the shell rolls over and dies on me. Why can't all the OSes just be friends?
- Surely the Quote of the Semester (Student Category). In response to a query on ambitions/motivations. Lock As can be inferred from the above, school is in session again. It actually feels nice to be back in circulation. For once, there is no module in the traditional computing sense (1x research, 1x facebook, 1x E-econs). Time will be at a premium, though, and something has to give; A quick reality check reveals that I have been spending about a couple of hours a day on my six twenty-plus-times-ascended Kingdom of Loathing accounts (and am just off a nearly unbroken streak of 200 days of filthy lucre bounty hunting for the Tome of Transcendent Olfaction, a singularly priceless item that allows for more effective gathering of yet more items) even with KOLmafia botting, so it is with regret that I seal them off until May. Just too much at stake. The procedure is rather simple, and is in the same spirit as deleting desktop applications (read: games). First, open Notepad and type a random string of characters, keeping in mind the maximum password length (in KoL, it is 15 characters). Next, while all the time not concentrating on what these characters are, copy and paste them into the relevant password-changing utility. Repeat for all accounts, then for good measure zip up the saved Notepad file and dump it somewhere safe but not particularly accessible. The last time I did it for the now-defunct Twilight MUD, I promptly lost the envelope, so this time my Gmail account should be good enough. Unless our very own A* manages to lure sufficient next-generational search talent to run Google into the ground with the huge reward of US$100000 (almost two round lots of Google stock!), of course. IPPT (Mati) So that's settled. Thursday was my scheduled IPPT (Individual Physical Proficiency Test), the selection of that particular date being due to the fact that there was no later date more than anything else. To put it kindly, I am nowhere near top shape, and knew it - but held on to the somewhat misguided perception that I could breeze my way to a silver. How wrong I was. Arriving at Maju camp did make me recall one aspect of NS instantly, which was the waiting. The sometimes interminable waiting. In this case, it was my own fault, since I was far too early. The waiting that was their fault would come later. Wore a PT kit for the first time in some years. Ah, the days when I did five-minute kilometres for upwards of 16km in them, and still feel okay. Ancient history. I didn't even get to the 2.4km run. Attempted the Standing Broad Jump first, that bane of many otherwise perfectly fit guys, due to the fact that it appears extremely difficult to train for explosive ability. Cranked out two 220+ cm leaps, which isn't that bad I suppose, especially if Mr. Alvinny isn't there to jump over the whole mat. Sit-ups next. I had always regarded it as the sort of exercise that is unpleasant but forceable, and so it was. I was left pretty breathless after that, and the pattern of aches around my tummy the day after left me to suspect that I hadn't been using the bottom part of my abs at all, since I'm pretty sure they still exist. Pull-ups. Now, I wouldn't have expected not to pass this station, not least because I had managed to do seven the night before. Nowhere near the 15 or 16 I could have managed in JC, but plenty good enough. Unfortunately, I remained a bit drained from the sit-ups, and after the fifth I sensed danger. I thought I did a sixth, but the machine didn't register. Never mind. Oneee... last... effort. No beep. GG. Stupid goal-line technology. The only laudable performance was in the Shuttle Run, where I did a 10.2s despite being half-hearted after the pull-ups. Then again, the difference between an A and an E in it is barely more than half a second, so one shouldn't read too much into it. Big5 In response to Chong. High scorers tend to be original, creative, curious, complex; Low scorers tend to be conventional, down to earth, narrow interests, uncreative. You typically don't seek out new experiences. (Your percentile: 47) Conscientiousness High scorers tend to be reliable, well-organized, self-disciplined, careful; Low scorers tend to be disorganized, undependable, negligent. You are neither organized or disorganized. (Your percentile: 52) Extraversion High scorers tend to be sociable, friendly, fun loving, talkative; Low scorers tend to be introverted, reserved, inhibited, quiet. You probably enjoy spending quiet time alone. (Your percentile: 5) Agreeableness High scorers tend to be good natured, sympathetic, forgiving, courteous; Low scorers tend to be critical, rude, harsh, callous. You find it easy to criticize others. (Your percentile: 14) Neuroticism High scorers tend to be nervous, high-strung, insecure, worrying; Low scorers tend to be calm, relaxed, secure, hardy. You tend to become anxious or nervous. (Your percentile: 60) Major difference only in the Conscientiousness part. $100 Challenge $50 on Newcastle to beat Bolton (at 1.70) - one for Keegan's return $25 on Arsenal (-1.5) vs Fulham (at 2.20) - Gunners slowing, but more than a match $25 on Tottenham (-1.5) vs Sunderland (at 2.05) - Keane's magic fading?
- + hamsters - ...Red Devils to take it by two or more goals over the Magpies. Yes, I did admonish myself to stop placing wagers on the club I support, but come to think of it I should know them the best. The other fixtures this week are hard to call, too. $1973.85/$1900 now. $50 on Man Utd (-1.5) vs Newcastle (at 1.67)
- reviews - Semester Seven of my university life is due to begin in three days, and out of nowhere I'm a fourth-year senior. Thing about life is, it goes on. Began exercising the ol' printing skills by committing the entire GE1001E E-Readings list to paper, all 149 double-sided sheets of it, yesterday. Ring-bound the lot today. Feels nice to get a jump on things for once. The articles appear rather... eclectic. Starting with "imaginative geographies", it takes the scenic route through multinational firms, globalization in the 21st century, popular music in Singapore (beats me), a case study of Pasir Ris and of McDonalds' in Beijing. Not a lot of physical geography, I gather, judging from the few maps sparsely spread out. Don't recall too many of the details from secondary school anyway. Here, I have to commend the Reserve Books/Readings cum E-Reserves staff of the NUS Central Library. A major gripe of the E-Readings system is that the PDF files are often downloadable exactly once by each account - with download being defined as clicking on the link, never mind if the student accidentally cancels instead of saving, or if the transfer is interrupted. The accidental cancel happened to me, but the nice people over at the library reset my permissions for that particular file after just half an hour of my notifying them. Bliss. I don't see too much logic in that restriction. The first explanation that jumped to mind was the conservation of bandwidth, but selected files are available to be read online with a Flash reader prohibiting saving, so that shouldn't be the case, not that I see the majority of students continually hammering the server with requests either. Keeping people to one download simply annoys without contributing towards enforcement of copyright laws, as the files can be copied limitlessly once on another computer anyway. Sort of as the detective says in Around the World in Eighty Days, "...Passports are only good for annoying honest folks, and aiding in the flight of rogues." Are we going down this road? Can't say the same about service from my web host, sadly. The site went down for half a day yesterday (despite them finally managing to invoice me - their billing form does not recognize the existence of non-American territories), and the recent reviews I've got of them are universally negative. It may be time to look for a new host soon. And on the subject of reviews, I'm due for a few. A trip to Borders a few weeks ago saw me return with some books, for while they are probably available from the library, some small support of the authors appeared in order, much as music fans do purchase CDs instead of just pirating songs all the time. The 3 for 2 offer also helped. Ladies and gentlemen, a hand for Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner (which has already been referenced in a previous post - The Seeing Tongue is an example of stuff covered in their blog), The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and The Afghan by Frederick Forsyth. I will leave the former two for a more propitious occasion. About The Afghan. What can I say? I've read a number of Forsyth tour de forces, and his newest offering doesn't quite compare. The back cover trumpets praise from the Daily Mail proclaiming that it is his "finest novel since the Jackal, a story as fresh as tomorrow's headlines...", which is to me quite unbelievable. His fiction debut, The Day of The Jackal was quite incomparable (as is conceded by the rather generous critic), but the earlier followups like The Dogs of War and The Devil's Alternative were gems in their own right. Now, recycle the main character of the so-so The Fist of God, accidentally "volunteered" for a potentially lethal mission for a second time by his flabby bigmouthed academic brother (who perhaps secretly resents his tanned, macho military sibling a little). Mix in a dash of fashionable Arabic terrorism and culture, but never to the immersive standards of Jackal, and continue with an F-100 jet engine crashing by pure chance into the prison compound wall of the titular Afghan to allow the story to drag a little longer with a less than challenging manhunt, before the big finale which unfortunately feels directly upgraded from The Devil's Alternative with additional improbable premises. Verdict: Not one of his better works. Beg, borrow, buy his earlier ones. For the other book I'll cover today, I have to thank my cousin (who has made it a habit of borrowing Marvel/DC titles too). It's Alice in Wonderland and the World Trade Center Disaster by David Icke (website). Icke is an... interesting personality who has gone from playing goalie for Coventry City, to public speaker (though the footballer to after-dinner speaker career path is a traditional one) and fantastic conspiracy theorist. Even if you take his writing as pure fiction, they're worth it for entertainment value alone. Though the book contains countless unsavoury allegations against "Boy" George Bush and his gang, it did get into the National Library system (which proves that censorship in Singapore is a relative affair after all), and thus it should not be too unreasonable to discuss, within bounds, its content. Icke began by asserting that many of the world's rulers are of a common ancient bloodline, and are aided by the Illuminati, whose influence it is said can be seen on the backbone currency of the world - in the form of the Eye of Providence on the United States One Dollar Bill. Supposedly, the Illuminati goddess Queen Semiramis is a dead ringer for the Statue of Liberty too, though on the somewhat weak evidence of a single image on a coin. 
At the very least they have a cool ambigram logo (Source) The higher levels (above and beyond the 33rd degree of the Scottish Rite) of the Freemasons are held to be part of the Illuminati, though with the rather junior fifth degree already titled "Perfect Master" one may see why some Masons are satisfied with their rank. "Sublime Master Ejected" (11th degree)? "Knight of the Rose Croix of HRDM" (18th degree)? "Child of the Tabernacle" (23rd degree)? "General Inspector Inquisitor Commander" (31st degree)? Where do they come up with such things? I sense a game-background opportunity. As an aside, Freakonomics mentions that the downfall of the Ku Klux Klan was partially due to having its secrets widely exposed. Supposedly these Illuminati dipped their feet into all forms of human belief, of course including religious engineering - ".. Religions have created rigid belief systems that should never be questioned. They have imposed those beliefs through fear, indoctrination, isolation, and the mass genocide of non-believers...". Let it be said that Icke at least throws some sensible tidbits in. Icke's take on money is also non-complimentary. "The Illuminati financial sting... is based on creating money that doesn't exist and lending it to people and business in return for interest... If even a fraction of the people who theoretically have money deposited in a bank went today to remove it, the banks would slam the door in half an hour because they don't have it. Money in the bank is a myth, another confidence trick..." Which on the face of things is indeed true. Banks do lend most of what they have, which when deposited in other banks - or even itself - can then be used to lend further. The next few chapters go over the "Bush crime family", covering issues like George Bush's alleged "complex" relationships with the Bin Ladens, Saudis, Taliban and others, which has been aired in more popular media such as Fahrenheit 9/11; His "white horse" squeaking into a cushy domestic National Guard assignment (despite sucky pilot aptitude test scores) instead of taking his chances in Vietnam like the rest of the guys; His membership of the shady Skull and Bones Society at Yale (with real skulls, Icke says); His grandfather's funding of Hitler, and his own funding of Saddam (though "enemy of my enemy is my friend of convenience" deals are probably common politically). Following on, criticism of the Gulf War and indiscriminate accidental slaughter of civilians and mixed convoys in turkey shoots, with the sage observation that the definition of "war crimes" depends a lot on which side of the war one is on. Less substantiated are the accusations of mind control and child abuse, as Icke does himself few favours by following up reasonable statements with close to lunatic ones. But that's his style, I infer. Blah blah blah Dick Cheney, Colin Powell and Richard Armitage, blah blah connections to the Queen of England and Tony Blair (Bush being buddy-buddy with the latter does seem very likely), Oklahoma City bombing Pearl Harbor blah blah... you get the idea. Then he gets to the meat, which is 9/11. It's long and meandering, but there are several main lines of questioning. Some, like the "fact" that some of the hijackers are in fact still alive, or why the hijackers crashed into the section of the Pentagon undergoing reinforcement (chance, insufficient skill or simply ignorance?) are quite weak. Others, like:
Bush the Bibliophile (Source) Icke really goes off the beaten track in the final chapters, as he claims, among other things, that:
Song of the week - Potential Breakup Song by Aly and AJ (cousin recommendation). See Youtube music vid. I have run after victory and I won her. But when I found myself beside her I felt despair. The glows of her insignia illuminated everything, The ashes of the dead, the suffering of the living. Álvaro Obregón (from the Civilization Fanatics' Forums)
- + hamsters - Attended another cousin's wedding at Sheraton Towers yesterday night. Despite coughing fits as I recover from the cold, I still couldn't resist sampling a bit of everything. The table favours were arresting too. Considered passing them on to the hammies to play with, but on second thought that might be slightly inappropriate. 
Salt, pepper, shake shake shake The difficult decision was taken with my cousin to limit our hamsters' daily nutritional intake, after Ham & Bacon parked himself permanently in the food bowl and began building rolls of fat around himself. Though not taken well by the constituents, we nevertheless put the new rule into action while they fought their case. Atkins? Bah. It's the crash diet for you two. A tumultuous day followed, in which the hams were greeted in the morning by the unspeakable horror of a completely empty food bowl. The five stages of grief follow. Denial: Although I have ballooned to twice my original size, I blame my genes. 
The perfect ellipse described Anger: Grrrr! *Gnaws wood* Raarraaggghhhhh!!! *Chews metal* 
I go on a consumption strike 
Must get some iron in my system Bargaining: C'mon, just one more seed. Pretty pleeaassseeeee? 
Surely this huge shimmery eye is worth something? Depression: Just kill me. 
A ham of infinite sadness Acceptance: ...Never! Give us seeds or give us death! Well, four out of five ain't bad. The story does have a happy ending for the hams, as the senior adults in the household unanimously agreed that the cute, plump little dearies deserved their munchables. Hai. At this rate, they will be plumping for their own blog soon enough. 
Defend thy seed unto chokehold Tidied up and partially catalogued my CD/DVD-ROM collection today. School's starting up again - time to get used to it. A soundout for the Xavier Enigma physics engine - how far can you fling a projectile with it? 
Stack em up
- current events - + hamsters - It seems that my aspirations towards a two-day week have been brutally dashed. Rest assured that this is not purely a reflection on my slothfulness, as I like to imagine that the non-negotiable one-and-a-half hour round-trip transport time incurred each time I haul butt down to campus can be more effectively expended on other matters. The more-or-less confirmed list for the coming semester is: CS3209 - Second half of UROP CS3216 - Facebook fun, peace, laughter EC3303 - Econometrics I. No choice since I plan for II and III in the final two semesters (towards Econs degree) GE1101E - Place, Environment, Society. Exposure module (towards Econs degree) SN1101E - South Asia: People, Culture, Development. The lure of threes is indeed great for Arts and Social Sciences. Exposure module (towards Econs degree) CS3265 - Economics of E-Business. Combining CS with Econs, how can I fail? No tutorials on Monday or Thursday though *sobzz*, so I'll probably try for the Friday afternoon slot and hope for basketball after that. Actually, I might have preferred to attempt something like Metaphysics or Introduction to Political Science in lieu of Economics of E-business for Unrestricted Electives, but it is finally time to string the CAP system in seriousness. Since learning is available everywhere, I might as well jack up the numbers for show. Was checking up the local fixed deposit interest rates (DBS) (OCBC) (UOB) a couple of days ago, and got rather curious about the wide bands. For instance, take a one-year fixed deposit (information correct as of January 4 2008):
Ignoring the fact that the interest paid either way is rather paltry, the question is why there exists such a huge discrepancy. Yes, it is understandable if the banks slap penalties on jokers who try to open a time deposit account with their lunch money, but the administrative fees for handling ten thousand bucks (or for that matter, forty-nine thousand bucks) should be about as tiny a fraction of the capital as a fifty thousand dollar transaction. Yet the interest is more than doubled! Put another way, a guy who wished to put S$10k in a fixed deposit account could sit outside a bank with a huge sign announcing his intentions; All he needs is four other guys in the same situation, and then they could band together and each gain an extra S$100 or thereabouts simply by pooling their cash. Of course, there are some issues - there is some loss of flexibility in withdrawal of individual contributions, and also the question of trust in the person whose name the deposit will be placed under. These are not insurmountable however, and I wonder if a service to aggregate such small savers contravenes any Singaporean banking laws. The modus operandi would be blindingly simple - advertise for people with a few hundreds or thousands lying about that they are pretty sure they will not be needing for a year, and once enough is gathered throw it into a single big fixed deposit. The participants gain in that they achieve a higher return than they would otherwise have been able to get, since as far as I know banks do not tailor for this class of people, and the secondary intermediary gains in that it can take a cut and provide a legal framework for the (essentially riskless) service. The question is if a sufficient volume exists to make it worthwhile, and if so whether new entrants will quickly compete away excess profits... Not that it takes much effort to make money sometimes, by the way. I've been actively trying to get my credit card information over to my web hosting provider, and even shot off a short and straightforward support ticket, only to get a response that once again looks as if it was cut-and-pasted off some generic template and does not even pretend to approach my queries. Seriously, I think the person who makes these replies has the easiest job on Earth, since it appears not to require any semblance of reading comprehension. Or perhaps some program just culled keywords from the text and selected a premade answer. I can't tell the difference. On the far end of the industry spectrum is Toronto Raptors power forward Chris Bosh, who sure didn't wait for someone to hand him an NBA All-Star spot. He gamely produced his own campaign video to win votes, plastering it on his own website too. Just for that, he got a nomination from me. Ah, I had to pick nine other fellas. Hmm, here goes: Western Conference - Dirk Nowitzki (F), Tim Duncan (F), Allen Iverson (G), Tracy McGrady (G), Yao Ming (C) Eastern Conference - Chris Bosh (F), Kevin Garnett (F), Gilbert Arenas (G), Dwyane Wade (G), Ben Wallace (C) The chance that a single vote will make the difference in any large election is however close to zero, so the direct influence that it has on the outcome is likewise next to nothing according to standard game theory, which concludes that the personal/social gratification from voting alone must outweigh the costs of voting (very low if online) for a person to exercise his right to vote, i.e. PB + D > C where P is the probability that the vote will make a difference (which is only the case where the vote is otherwise tied), B is the relative benefit from the favoured vote outcome, D is the abovementioned gratification and C the costs (which may not be trivial if transportation and time lost from work come in). Well, voting could always be made a compulsory obligation when people do get clever. In recent local news, teachers are due to get some extra pay. While I support this overdue recognition of the profession, and my cousin on an MOE teaching scholarship should be rejoicing too, tacking bonuses onto "performance" could be a tricky innovation, if grades are considered a key component. As explored in Freakonomics, the introduction of similar measures in California ushered in a quaint phenomenon - cheating not by students, but by teachers who found their pay and position tied to the results of their pupils. The book states candidly: "Teacher cheating is rarely looked for, hardly ever detected, and just about never punished". Indeed, the US$25k bonus for top performers in California was eventually revoked for this very reason. Can this happen here? I would love to say no, but it is a fact that raising or maintaining results, as measured by number of passes in each subject, percentage of As, As+Bs, mean L1R5 or any number of such metrics appears to be extremely popular among schools here, or at least those which are put in a good light by those figures. It must be remembered though that there are many ways to manipulate this data, such as "encouraging" students who are performing poorly in a subject to drop it. Indeed, there has already been one case discovered where PSLE answers were changed with a different coloured pen - I suppose if the culprit took the care to at least match the pen colour, or altered pencil markings on OMR forms instead, the chicanery would be nigh undetectable (without specific checking with algorithmic methods, that is). My hams certainly know how to live it up. Leave them alone for a couple of days, and they redecorate their pad: 
Hmmm... something those clubs have in common? Cleaning out their cage was a good opportunity to take them through some trials, where they demonstrated some tricks they had learnt by peeking out at the Football Channel between the bars: 
I do 10000 stepovers! Sadly things got rough real fast, as we learnt that they had yet to come across the concept of a foul: 
No, biting an opponent's leg is not a legal move Ejection of the offender proved to be thankless... 
Unhand me! Now!
- changelog - changelog v1.07d --------------- * Google Analytics installed. * Redundant copyright notice updated. Been a little down due to being down with a slight cold after the Genting trip. Not enough to deter me from dreaming up some resolutions for the coming year - here goes:
Haven't kept a running total for the EPL prediction challenge for a month now. It's at $1861.85/$1800 now, thanks to low but steady gains in the past few weeks. A good way to usher in the new year, with United hosting Birmingham. I've tied up and gagged the hamsters for this one, so there should be no repeat of the fiasco at West Ham. $100 on Man Utd to beat Birmingham (at 1.12)
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