Category: Lifestyle Activities

Notable quote: “If you have no shadows, you are not standing in the light.”

Notable question: Pay attention at 37 minutes when Malaysia gets the lime-light.

While I used to teach programming at Cambridge, I have never quite taught it like this before. I am now teaching programming to an 18 year old girl. She actually asked to do an internship with AESTE. However, after interviewing her I realised that she lacked the necessary domain knowledge to do the work that I require. However, since she was interested in programming, I offered to teach it to her anyway.

The way that I am teaching programming to her, is experiential. I gave her a one-day class in programming where I covered the basics of data-structures, algorithms and tool-chain. Then, I got her to write program that interested her. She likes simulations and started writing a planetary simulator with moons. Now, she is writing a real-time strategy game engine.

During the course of teaching her, I asked her what her plans were. At first, she told me that she wanted to study Mechanical Engineering but her reasons for doing so were extremely weak. So, I gave her some advice on how to choose an area of study and since she was really interested in programming, I gently nudged her towards computer related fields.

She does seem quite concerned about making money with her field of study and I had to keep stressing to her that you can make money in any number of ways regardless of what field of study she chooses. She still has some time to figure things out but in the mean-time, I will continue to encourage her in the right direction.

https://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf

I took part as a judge in the FIRST LEGO League Malaysia Open Championship recently. Once more, it was an exciting competition and I am totally impressed with how the students came up with creative ideas to solve the various problems they face. The atmosphere and excitement this year was palpable and I am totally in love with the competition.

I plan to bring AESTE into the competition next year. If I have some money to spend, I will provide some monetary sponsorship. This would most likely be in the form of sponsoring a school to compete or to help partly sponsor the winning teams to represent Malaysia overseas. If I do not have money to spend I can participate in terms of time and effort. I will get all my staff to take part in mentoring teams. It should be fun.

To give you an idea of how much work these students get their robots to do, take a look at the video below.

http://www.facebook.com/v/1864984868350

Sasbadi produced a newsletter for the event.

Woah!

Natalie Portman deserves an Oscar.

She practically carried off the entire film on her own. Her performance was so good that I actually jumped off my seat at some points and it brought a tear to my eye at the end.

Superb!

Edit@2011-02-28: Yeay! Natalie got the Oscar! And she actually thanked the camera operator, who definitely deserves the credit for doggedly following her around throughout filming. Bravo!

My day did not start well. Trouble started early in the morning when I went to a bank to get some things done. Things turned further south when I went to work after that. However, things turned sharply north in the afternoon.

I am doing some teaching while boot-strapping my own company. As I walked into one of my classes this afternoon, a student of mine said to me – “Sir, I like your class la”. So, I asked him, “What do you like about it?” and he said – “Sir, when you teach I don’t sleep!”

I thought about it and realised that nobody has slept in any of my classes yet, and half the semester has already passed! It’s so easy to make me happy.

I just finished reading this book over the last two nights. Oh boy, it is good! I don’t even know how to describe the book. So, I’ll just quote the author’s introduction instead:

God’s Debris doesn’t fit into normal publishing cubby-holes. There is even disagreement about whether the material is fiction or nonfiction. I contend that it is fiction because the characters don’t exist. Some people contend that it is nonfiction because the opinions and philosophies of the char acters might have lasting impact on the reader.

The story contains no violence, no sexual content, and no offensive language. But the ideas expressed by the characters are inappropriate for young minds. People under the age of fourteen should not read it.

The target audience for God’s Debris is people who enjoy having their brains spun around inside their skulls. After a certain age most people are uncomfortable with new ideas. That certain age varies by person, but if you’re over fifty-five (mentally) you probably won’t enjoy this thought experiment. If you’re eighty going on thirty-five, you might like it. If you’re twenty-three, your odds of liking it are very good.

The story’s central character has a view about God that you’ve probably never heard before. If you think you would be offended by a fictional character’s untraditional view of God, please don’t read this.

It made a really interesting read, especially towards the end. I think that I am about level 4.5 awareness or so. Interesting…