Month: June 2008

http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swfMy friend’s wedding was an interesting affair for me. It’s only the second church wedding that I’ve been to in my life, and it’s the very first Chinese church wedding that I’ve been to. So, there were many interesting bits of it.

The day started with Ray picking me up from my hostel and driving over to church. When we arrived, he went on to set up the video camera as he was the designated video man for the day. I was being a busy body and helping him a bit. Then, a guy came over to ask Ray a few questions. After that the guy looked at me, and the conversation went something like this:

Random guy: (staring oddly at me) Who are you?
Me: Hi, I’m Shawn, a friend of the bride’s.
Random guy: (looking surprised) Oh, I’ve never met you before.
Me: Yea, I’m a friend from College.
Random guy: Hi, I’m the groom.
Me: (looking exceedingly embarrassed) Oh! Congratulations!

Pretty silly right? And throughout this time, Ray was standing right next to us and not saying anything! I have never met the groom before and I don’t know how he looks like. When I asked Ray earlier, which was the groom, Ray told me that he was the best dressed guy. Incidentally, the groom is Ray’s cousin. Well, that’s just so Ray.

Soon after that, the bride arrived and the ceremony started. The ceremony itself was pretty interesting. The groom was from Edinburgh, and spoke Cantonese. The bride was from China, and spoke Mandarin. When they took their vows, they both did it in their own language, Cantonese and Mandarin. I found that rather curious especially since they struggled a bit with the extremely formal form of the language. It is your typical “till death to us part” kind of vow. And a comical bit happened when the groom forgot to remove the veil, which he promptly fixed when reminded.

Another interesting bit was the hymn singing during the ceremony. As I do not know any of the hymns, I usually try to just follow along. The music is usually quite simple to follow. So, I just wanted to make sure that I was singing the right parts. But when I tried to listen to the singing, I couldn’t catch which parts everyone else was singing. After a while, I realised why. Most of the congregation was singing in Chinese, while I was trying to discern the English lyrics!

I believe that the thing that sets this ceremony apart from regular church weddings is the bowing. After they were declared man and wife, they took three bows. One to the family of the groom, one to the family of the bride, and the last to everyone present. In return everyone bowed back. So, there was a lot of bowing involved, which makes it a very East Asian kind of ceremony.

Although Ray and I had agreed to get them a gift together, he went on and got them something on his own. So, I was left stranded and had to do the traditional thing of just giving them a red-packet. Thing was, Ray forgot to bring me a red-packet either. So, I had to scrounge around my bags for an old decrepit piece of angpow. Well, as long as it’s red and it contained money, I guess. And I gave it to the bride when I spoke to her after the ceremony.

After the ceremony, there was some lunch, prepared by the members of the church. Damn, it was good authentic Chinese food. I’ve not had such nice stuff in ages. So, I made sure that I had a good helping of everything: dimsum, pau, zhang, ribs, rice, noodles. Everything. Then, there was a photo session outside, with the wedding couple. This took a long time as people had to queue up to get their photos taken. After that, people made their way off.

Some people then went off to the wedding banquet for dinner. I went off to town, to visit the National Portrait Gallery. I never thought that a gallery of peoples’ faces could be so interesting. Then, I caught the bus to the airport and flew back to Cambridge.

PS: The bride’s gown is very elegant. She makes a very beautiful bride.

I spent last weekend in Edinburgh, Scotland. For some reason, it reminds me a lot of Ipoh. Both cities are surrounded by hills, are about the same size, and the way that the main city centre is laid out between two parallel straight roads, just seems so quaint. The main difference, is obviously the overbearing presence of the castle.

I took a noon flight on Saturday. Ray picked me up at the airport and acted as my chauffeur and tour guide for much of the weekend. He took me on one of his standard whirlwind tours on the first day. Mainly, we visited the castle complex, which was interesting. Then, we went to an OZ pub where I had some roo meat. I actually think that it tastes quite good. It’s a little tougher than chicken and much juicier than beef.

However, by the end of the day, I was knackered. So, I went back to my hostel to sleep. I checked into a mixed dorm and got put into a room with four other girls. After getting a shower, I quickly fell asleep but was disturbed many times by people chatting. Two girls in my room came back late and kept whispering away for an awful long time. But there were noisier kids in other rooms. At one point, somebody lost their cool and shouted at the people making the noise, and it worked.

The next day, was my own free day as Ray had to go help prepare and set up things for a wedding. And seeing that the weather forecast said rain, I decided to go visit some museums. The National Museum is really quite good. It provided the history of Scotland, from the time they were a bunch of mixed tribes all over, came together as Scots and got unified with England. Now, I can understand why there is so much talk of devolution. The Scots were never conquered and so, still retain all their pride as an independent nation.

Then, I met up with Ray and some of his friends from church. After dinner, we went off Musselburgh, which is outside Edinburgh, for some really good ice cream. The name of the place is S. Luca and it has been selling fresh ice cream for more than a century. There was a long queue outside when we arrived but service was quick. Then, we went to various beaches at Portobello till it was quite late.

After sending his friends back, we went off for some fish and chips where Ray introduced me to the Edinburgh sauce, which had an interesting taste. We then had some drinks at the pub and chatted for a bit about the frustrations of writing up a thesis. As we had a wedding to attend the next day, I went back to my room, and slept. It was a quiet night and I slept nicely till morning.

I’ll talk about the wedding in another entry, after I have post-processed the photographs. I got some really good ones and I might make a photo book out of it, for the bride. Post processing may take a while though, as I have to work on my thesis. And post-processing wedding photos can be quite a chore, as I need to make the photos exude love and happiness. Hopefully, it’ll be easy in this case.

If you look at the small gallery of photos I have on Edinburgh, you will see three that look a bit odd. These are more experiments with HDR photography. I really need to figure out a way to get rid of the noise in the sky. I particularly like the one of St Mary’s Cathedral and the Castle.

I have just read an interesting blog today, about the dichotomy between engineering types and business types, and how it causes problems within an organisation. It was an interesting read and it brought to mind the issue of an engineering shortage in industrial nations. Although the examples given in the blog were mainly programmers vs managers, it is something that equally applies to engineers.

http://www.brightcove.tv/playerswf

I had particularly liked a couple of points raised:

• Programmers are craftsmen. As craftsmen, they work to a quality line, NOT a deadline. Programmers do not respect authority, only ability. There is programmer calculus: “We have two different opinions. You have one vote. I, being smarter and more well-informed, have two votes.”
• The industrial world lowered production costs to make money. The post-industrial world raises quality to make money. Managers are trained to focus on efficiency, product goals, and deadlines: these are byproducts of the industrial era. Senior executives are essentially in denial about the fact that software can’t be mapped to industrial benchmarks.
• Business types have an artificial sense of urgency, which leads to wastefulness. Executives are focused on putting out new features quickly, because “tech moves fast.” However, user goals change very slowly. There’s not really a need to “move fast.”
• It’s genuinely impossible to answer a lot of simple business questions when it comes to software. For example, with estimating deadlines: “Writing software is like walking through a minefield. It’s really fast to get through…as long as you don’t step on any mines.”

Sometimes, I wonder how things will turn out in the end. An “insurgence” of quality is truly needed indeed.

I wonder if anyone else can remember the “inflasi sifar” (zero inflation) campaign that was held by the government around the mid-90s. I can remember that there were posters hanging everywhere and even a little campaign song playing on TV all the time. That was the first time I was exposed to the concept of price inflation. Today, I dare not imagine what’s going to happen to our economy in Malaysia.

Everywhere I go, I read that the price of commodities are going up. The government’s price control mechanisms, which were used to curb inflation for decades, is failing. Therefore, I do believe that years of backdated inflation, is going to catch up with us, in a very bad way. Although I am not an economist, even I know that it spells trouble when the price of fundamental commodities go up.

The price of rice, which is a staple in Malaysia, has been going up steadily. This will affect every single family at home. The cap on cement is being lifted immediately and this will affect all the construction going on in the country. Worst of all, the control on petrol is slowly being lifted and the target is to have pump prices follow market rates at the end. This will affect the cost of transportation, which ultimately affects everything.

Personally, I think that having artificial price controls is not necessarily a good thing. However, I have to think about people as well. Regular people will be pinched badly, when the controls are lifted. The trouble is that the wages in Malaysia, has not kept up with things. Over the years, we have artificially deflated our economy. So, nobody, not even the government, has been raising annual wages realistically.

As a result, if the cost of living rises sharply, a lot of people are going to get hurt in the short term. Then, the government would need to raise the civil service pay significantly, in order to keep up. This will then force the private sector to do the same. As a result, everyone needs to pay more for everything: food, petrol, cement, and even labour.

Seeing that I might be going home soon, I tried to see if there were ways that would allow me to curb my spending. For one, I will have to stop driving everywhere. The good news is that I live rather closely to many places and so, I can possibly afford to cycle around a bit. It’s going to be extremely hot and possibly dangerous. But at least, I would be able to save on direct petrol costs.

And, every problem presents an opportunity. Any increase in the price of goods, presents an opportunity for a business to supply an alternative, at a cheaper price. I have actually been thinking and researching along these lines recently and have surprisingly, found an undeveloped niche. All that is needed is a leaner, meaner way of doing business and some creative sourcing. Maybe it’s time to flesh out the ideas a little bit more and maybe go into that business.

I dread to think how this is going to ultimately work out. I guess that I’ll just need to put my trust in the people managing the economy. Yes, you economists out there, please don’t screw things up. Let’s try to optimise inflation and hopefully, things will all turn out right at the end of the day. I just pray that I won’t have to end up forking RM10 for a roti canai at my local mamak. Maybe it’s time to bring back the inflasi sifar jingle.