When will it end?

Hopefully never!

I just got to watch Inception today, after hearing rave reviews on it from many people. In the end, I didn’t think that it was all that great and I might not even buy the BluRay when it comes out. Don’t misunderstand me, it is a good movie, just not great.

It was not as much of a mind-bender as I had hoped for. The story is pretty straight-forward and the ending was totally expected. The only question that remained is whether the last dream was a deeper dream level or if it was the superficial dream level. Either way, he managed to go down 5 dream levels! Since each dream-level over-clocks the brain by 20 times, that means that his brain was over-clocked 3,200,000 times!

The ending is definitely a dream, for various reasons – the fact that the kids didn’t seem to age a day and that the totem was spinning non-stop for the ending.

The best thing about the movie is Ellen Page – Ariadne (she’s even got a cool character name!). I’ve loved her acting since I saw ‘Hard Candy’ years ago. She pretty much carried off that entire movie, that and ‘Juno’ too. I honestly think that she is quite a good child actress that has grown well into adult roles – unlike Dakota Fanning.

That said, I may still get the BluRay if they throw in some extras.

Who’d ever guess that I was directly affected by the MTV World Stage Live in Malaysia concert. I organised a dinner last night at Sunway Pyramid Convention Centre and I was obviously too old to know that they were having an MTV concert right next door at Sunway Lagoon. Murphy’s Law – everything that could have gone wrong, did. However, we managed to recover gracefully.

First of all, the traffic was horrendous. As every tween was trying to get into Sunway for the concert, we were also directly affected by it. Everyone got stuck in the massive jam leading towards Sunway. Parking was a nightmare with people circling around for more than an hour to find one. Some of our guests did not turn up and even one VIP called to say that he was going home after failing to find any parking in the area for more than an hour.

So, we delayed the start of the event by about 30 mins.

We had solicited the help of several student members to help with the event, namely to help give out awards and to control the slide projection. However, due to the traffic congestion, they were late and I had to brief a number of substitutes at the last minute. I explained to the girls what they needed to do and in order to reduce the confusion, we would collect all the medals and certificates back so that we can sort out any last minute problems. As for the slides, I made them fool proof by simply numbering them in sequence, without any contextual knowledge required.

Never underestimate the ingenuity of fools.

As the event started, the computer that we used to control slide projection on the left side of the room – died. I had to rush to the front to get things fixed. The speaker’s slides were in that computer and he was coming on in 5 minutes. After fixing that problem, and beginning to breathe better, the computer on the other side of the room, died too. So, I quickly dashed across the hall to fix that problem too.

Thankfully, no other computers died after that. It was my fault for not having a backup on standby.

Then, as the speeches went off without a hitch, and the food came out, I got down to eating something because I had a feeling that things would still go wrong during the dinner. As the courses were served, we had a good time with the food. Everyone commented that the food was quite good – I selected the menu blindly and was just hoping for the best!

Then, came the time for the awards.

Although mostly uneventful, the emcee had a slight cock-up towards the end and I had to sort of predict and improvise things on the spot. Thankfully, I was able to be at two places at once – at the VIP table and at the awards table. Aside from that small problem, everything else proceeded smoothly. We could’ve done with a little drum-roll but that was about it.

I could’ve done well with a few other helpers to usher the award receipients, but no biggie.

All in all, the event went on pretty well. I had to say that it was quite a feat to have pulled it off. We had an organising committee of about 3 main people and we pulled off a 200 person dinner event in 5-weeks from start to finish. That’s not too shabby at all.

You can never go wrong with the formula – bunch of good looking young people singing songs on screen. Add in a splash of teenage angst, love triangles and sexual spice. You have the formula for a guaranteed success.

My favourite song starts at 4:20. I like the simplicity of the songs in Glee.

I just hope that FOX does not ruin it!

Yesterday was an interesting evening. I was walking back to my car after having my favourite pork noodles when I heard sirens going off. It’s not like sirens are uncommon in the city, but this was the first time that I witnessed a real chase. What made it more interesting was that it happened in my housing area – a part of town that is not well known for random crimes.

Anyway, as the cars were rushing down the road that my car was parked on, I decided against trying to get into my car until they passed. I quickly got over to the side walk and watched the scene unfold. The lead car had two people in it – the driver and a passenger. For some reason, the passenger was lying down in the passenger seat, which to me meant that, he was either hiding or hurt.

Unfortunately, both the police and the lead car were Proton Wajas. This meant that they would not be able to out-run the police. The police did not need to do anything other than just stay on their tail until they made a mistake at some point – like going the wrong way down the one-way street that my car was parked on. Things were pretty interesting.

Anyway, after they zoomed past me, I got into my car and drove back home. I thought to myself – that was interesting!

Turns out that this baby is fairly affordable, when it comes to fancy cars, that is. RM 240k OTR price, with a RM5k monthly installment on a 48-month installment plan. Nice!

I attended a public lecture today, on the UUCA and The Constitution given by Dr Azmi Sharom, Assoc Professor at the Faculty of Law, Universiti Malaya. The gist of his lecture can be summarised as – there are constitutional grounds for having the UUCA but the question is whether those constitutional provisions are limitless or if there are limits to them in order to grant all citizens equal rights.

This question is currently being put to the test in the case of the UKM four who have brought their case to the High Court. The crux of the argument is that a university student has less rights than a dumb jock who does not qualify to get into university. The larger issue is to ensure that our universities churn out future leaders, innovators and thinkers instead of sheeple.

He did not really have much to talk about and there were not very many questions from the audience since the topic is a fairly dry one on constitutional law. However, Azmi Sharom is friggin’ hilarious! He kept the entire auditorium entertained and in stitches for slightly more than an hour. He really knows how to speak to the crowd and pull people in. I even contributed a little to the entire act. It was fun!

I wonder if Azmi conducts his actual classes like this. It would be fun to have a lecturer that can turn a boring topic into the funniest lecture that I have attended in ages.

Our country seems to have recently been wrecked by the death of a student at a local college. The primary cause of death is supposedly the treatment that the student received as part of a ‘ragging’ exercise by the senior students. As a result of which, there was plenty of outrage with government and university officials coming out to officially ban ‘ragging’ exercises at universities ahead of the beginning of the academic year for a lot of students.

My opinion on the matter – bad move. Banning the exercise will never stop it. Ragging is often a rite of passage that everyone goes through at university. If done correctly, it can build valuable bonds between seniors and juniors. However, when taken to the extreme, it can definitely cause physical and psychological harm, possibly leading to death either directly or indirectly associated with the activity.

Banning the time tested activity is just going to drive it underground, making it far more difficult to regulate and control. What should have been done is to ban extreme ragging and release guidelines on the limits of the activity. For example, any form of direct physical contact should be banned and any senior who assaults any junior should be caught and charged to the full extent of the law for causing grievous bodily harm.

Students may think that they were put through hell during their freshers’ week – until it becomes their turn to organise things. I missed quite a lot of sleep during my orientation week, and got quite pretty grumpy because of it. We were also put through a lot of seemingly stupid and dumb activities. We also had to put up with inane requests from our seniors to get things done.

However, when I became a senior, I lost even more sleep when I was involved in organising fresher activities – we had to make sure that the freshers were back to their rooms and wake up early to prep the things organised for the next day. Also, we spent weeks in advance, sacrificing our semester breaks to get things ready for welcoming the freshers. Trying to torture freshers in the nicest way is not easy to do without advance planning.

Also, because I was involved in organising these activities, and making the juniors do all sorts of silly things that they did not want to, I became quite well liked. Until today, I still sometimes run into people randomly at work or while shopping and have them come up to ask me if I was Shawn, their senior at university. While I have to politely tell them that I cannot recall their names, I can still recognise their faces. We end up having an amiable chat after that.

Now, looking back at my university days, I dare to say that I look back at things nostalgically. My history with ragging goes way back to secondary school, where I can still remember doing a hundred push-ups when I pissed off some of my seniors. I can still remember the song Buli, Buli, Buli that we were all forced to sing along doing various disgusting things. The coolest thing that my seniors ever did was to enact a serious ghost story that was so good, that some people pissed their pants.

Ah, those were the days.

Followed the instructions here for an authentic vintage feel, using Gimp.

Hilariously funny.

“…only because you are hot chicks. Nobody else cares about Facebook privacy…”

Not exactly true, but who am I to argue with hot chicks.