Sybreon Ones Nought

I’m rather curious with the recent decisions made by our government. As a result of the rising fuel prices, I had predicted that the government would raise the pay of the civil service, which would then force the private sector to follow suit, leading to a pay inflation in Malaysia. However, the government seems to have decided not to do that.

Instead, the government is now encouraging civil servants to seek employment outside the civil service to supplement their income. This is contrary to the General Orders of the civil service. All this time, it is general knowledge that although the GO exists, the government wouldn’t take any action against it’s employees. However, this time around, things are slightly different as the government is openly encouraging it’s employees to contravene the GO.

The idea of encouraging civil servants to get second jobs or start small businesses is only a very short term stop-gap measure. Assuming that the economy gets worse, then what? The civil servants are not immune from the effects of an ailing economy. With a limited economy, there are only so many things that you can sell, and so many part time jobs available. Assuming that the economy gets better, then what? Force all the civil servants to abandon their successful sources of secondary income in order to adhere to the GO? That would just be unfair to the civil servants who have put in an effort to make their little businesses work.

Then, there has also been recent suggestions by the government to pay it’s employees twice a month, instead of monthly. The excuse is that this will help the civil servants manage their expenses better by only releasing their pay packets, half a month at a time. This doesn’t make any sense to me as everything else is synchronised to a monthly pay cycle. So, bills will still need to be paid at the end of the month, with only half the pay packet in the bank.

What this silly idea suggests to me is that the government may be having some cash flow problems, which worries me. As usual, I think that our present government has gone bonkers. They are not thinking things through and only taking the short view. Maybe they don’t feel that they will be in power very much longer, and will leave the cleaning up to whomever takes over after. If that is true, it’s a rather sad situation for the rest of us to be in.

PS: I am not an economist nor a politician.

Of course, marks auditing isn’t all about the problems. There were also many funny parts of the process. Some of these students obviously have too much time on their hands during the exam.

There was a paper which I checked, where the student drew a small little cute cartoon at the end of each part of a question. So, there were a dozen or so little cartoons in the answer script. And the cartoons aren’t random cartoons either. They were all relevant to the question although none of them got any marks, which was a shame. The cartoons were actually quite good.

Then, there was another paper, where the student handed in an extra sheet of paper, which did not have anything on it except for a big cartoon, and an explanation of the cartoon. In it, the student explained that there were thirteen sheets of the answer script, and since thirteen is an unlucky number, the student decided to add an extra sheet with a cartoon in it, just to avoid being unlucky. Well, this student is obviously not Chinese, cause fourteen is probably just as bad, if not worse.

There are also some papers where our jobs as auditors were made very simple, by the fact that they got zero marks for the whole paper. Often, I will also find papers where the student had given about a dozen pages of answers, only to be awarded one mark, probably for the effort. It’s actually kind of sad when I see this and when another person can get full marks for the same question, by only answering everything on a single page.

There was even an instance, where the student had the paper upside down. So, the student flipped the page upright and left a short note on the top of the page, stating that the diagram was upside down. There isn’t any problem with this. But then, the problem is with the mark auditing. Not really sure if it was a 6 or a 9 seeing that the page is upside down. Of course, we ultimately work it out in the end.

And although we aren’t supposed to identify any individuals, we cannot help but be curious about any interesting papers that we come across. When we come across someone who scored more than 95% on a paper, we check to see how well that student did in other papers. We cannot really help being a bit nosy. We do the same when someone does very terribly in a paper too.

And finally, there are some students whose scripts are coded to indicate some special status. Most of these are fairly mundane, like being allowed to take their exams in college due to medical reasons or what nots. But there was this special category that made us all curious as to what it means. It was a code for Jewish students. Presumably, these students may not be allowed to take exams on certain dates. So, they may need to take their papers in quarantine.

I’ve been rather busy auditing the marks for several papers. Of all the modules that I checked, less than half of them were without error. There was only one engineering module that had some minor problem and was promptly fixed. However, for some reason, every management module that I audited had problems in them, with some very major problems, beyond my pay grade to solve.

For this particular module, there were no marks written on the answer scripts. In fact, there were numerous sheets with not even a scratch on them. This means that there is no indication that the sheets have even been read. Then, there were not marks written on the sheets themselves. So, I could not check if the totals in the mark book were actually correct. Even the final totals on the mark book are incorrectly entered. And finally, the distribution of marks were skewed.

I then emailed the examiner with a list of the problems and asked to meet up to rectify them. I was then asked by the examiner to fix some of them myself, and ignore some of the other problems. Obviously, I bumped this up and was told that I could not do it myself, for very obvious reasons that it’s just beyond my pay grade. Since I was lucky enough to have been assigned that module, I was the one who had to settle it.

I was told by the department that the examiner is from the business school next door. So, I called them up to contact the examiner. I was then told that there was no such person. Then, I asked if there might be an external lecturer with that name and was told that there was no such person. Panic!

Then, I dug up the earlier email from the examiner, which listed a mobile number as a contact number. I called up the mobile and got the examiner on the line. I then found out that the examiner lives in a second city and teaches at a third university but is also attached to an institute within the university. So, I guess that the examiner is some sort of adjunct lecturer. However, the examiner is currently overseas and will not be back until next week.

So, I set up a meeting with the examiner. However, I’ve just been told that I might not need to meet up with the examiner as the matter might be taken out of my hands. This is a problematic issue as the marks are needed by last week. We have bumped the issue up and are waiting for more direction. I’m hoping that they will take the thing out of my hands as there is little that I can do about it anyway, except act as an errand boy.

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.