Short Fuse

For some reason, I feel that I have been on a short fuse in recent weeks. Maybe it’s the stress of taking on too many things in life. Maybe it’s the certain eventuality of certain decisions that have to be made soon. Maybe it’s the chronic ache that I have had in my back for a few weeks. Maybe it’s the lack of rest due to disturbed sleep. Regardless of the reasons, I have definitely felt the blood rush faster and higher than it normally does.

As a mitigation, I have taken to exercise. I try to take a brisk walk through a nearby park whenever I get the chance to. Oddly enough, my brisk walk seems to be faster than some joggers. Yesterday, I overtook several joggers while reading a book. Yes, I read while I get my exercise. That’s why I walk, and not run. I would not be able to read while running.

However, I hope that a short break away from everything would be able to change things; at least, break the daily monotony and senseless work that I have been engaged in. I plan to come back ready to take a plunge into the future world!

Onsen, I need Onsen!

Salam Aidil-Fitri?

Wow, I knew that I no longer watched local television for a reason. However, even I got a bit stunned when I read this piece of news, first things this morning, on the BBC – “Malaysian Eid advert axed for resembling Christmas”. According to the article:

Malaysia’s TV3 has apologised for airing the festive clip, which wished Muslims a happy Eid al-Fitr, the end of the fasting month of Ramadan.

The advert showed an elderly man taking children aboard his flying carriage and travelling across a star-filled sky.

Critics said it was too akin to the tale of Santa Claus and his sleigh.

The clip provoked considerable criticism, much of it from internet and blogging sites, which deemed it insensitive and in poor taste.

It also depicted lotuses, which some complained have links to Buddhism and Hinduism.

This is just sad. I want to think that the majority of Malaysia is far more tolerant than this. However, the bigots are usually the vocal ones. I think that, in the spirit of celebrations, the silent majority should voice out our displeasure at such stupidity.

The ad was probably just an attempt, and even possibly an experiment, to integrate different aspects of Malaysian life and culture into a single ad. Someone probably thought that it was cute and creative because nobody has ever done something like this before.

We are probably one of the few countries in the world where it actually makes sense to integrated every religious symbol into everything that we do because we have so many kinds of people around. That is our strength and that is our uniqueness.

Unfortunately, we are now being show-cased as an intolerant bunch of ignorant people.

I miss Yasmin Ahmad.

Read TheStar

According to TheStar, the MCA president said that, “people should be critical enough not to accept everything that is reported online as all the information need not necessarily be true.”

It is important for people to differentiate the truths, half-truths and what is a complete lie

Okay, I will actually go one better than him and say that “people should be critical enough to not accept everything reported as the truth.”

You see, the reason why I like to read TheStar is because it is an adventure! If you read TheStar literally, it would be an extremely boring newspaper to read. However, if you try to read between the lines, that is when it gets pretty exciting. TheStar actually tries really hard to report the truth under self-censorship practiced by most local news outlets.

I used to always say that the solution to rumour mongering is to teach people how to think critically. Most things that are said will be inaccurate, if not blatantly false. The rest will largely be exaggerations. Only a really small amount of truth will actually be revealed. Therefore, it is critical that we teach children to learn how to discern the ‘truth’.

Let’s quote Colbert on truthiness:

It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that’s not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It’s certainty. People love the President because he’s certain of his choices as a leader, even if the facts that back him up don’t seem to exist. It’s the fact that he’s certain that is very appealing to a certain section of the country. I really feel a dichotomy in the American populace. What is important? What you want to be true, or what is true?…

Truthiness is ‘What I say is right, and [nothing] anyone else says could possibly be true.’ It’s not only that I feel it to be true, but that I feel it to be true. There’s not only an emotional quality, but there’s a selfish quality.

Hahaha! We really need people like Colbert and Stewart to help us discern the ‘truth’.

Playstation Home, Malaysia


Finally, after all this time, it is here! I don’t really have much to say about it at the moment. I’m still playing around with it. Will update this post soon.

Update@2010-09-04:
I have played with it for about an hour. I had some fun fiddling around with character customisation and playing dress-up. I even had some fun redecorating my home and moving furniture around. Then, I decided to explore a bit. I went out to the theatre and found it totally empty. I plan to visit the main square tomorrow and hope that I’ll meet some interesting people.

Merdeka? Rant

We suck as a nation.Yesterday was the official Merdeka (Independence) Day celebrations for Malaysia. It marks 50-over years of independence from our colonials – the Brits. Unfortunately, I did not feel very merdeka at all – not just in terms of the celebrations but also in personal terms. I just did not feel very happy at all.

It could just be that I have been rather unhappy with a whole lot of things and my unhappiness is stacking up gradually. I seem to be running short on my happiness quotient recently. There are just too many things to be depressed about in my life, and my nation by extension.

I find myself surrounded by idiots and as you all know, I do not suffer fools gladly. That’s the crux of the problem.

Maybe I should learn to see things differently, or to surround myself with less foolishness. I think that the latter would be an easier solution to the problem. However, I will have to find some way to alleviate the stress that I am currently under. Hopefully, things will turn out better after my holiday to Japan. Goodness knows I need a break from all this idiocy.

Life sucks. People are dumb. Learn to eat grass.

Ageism and Malaysia

Actually, this is not just applicable in Malaysia but rather, quite applicable throughout much of Asia. I lament on this issue as our nation will continue to bleed talent and brains if we continue to hold on to the age old ‘respect your elders’ mentality. The cause of the trouble is that people here tend to equate age with experience. Unfortunately, age merely indicates – being old, not experience.

Let me put it in context.

I have been actively programming for over 20 years. I have been writing production code used in products for almost half that time. Therefore, I would consider that my experience in programming would be about a decade of production code and two decades in total of active experience. However, most employers in Malaysia would consider me a fresher starting out in development because I have never held a development job in the past. What vexes me about this is that the decision is usually made by a hiring manager who has probably got less programming experience than me.

I came to this conclusion easily. Most of these managers are probably in their 40s and computers were not so prevalent during their time. So, most of them only started to code when they went to university, which was about 20 years ago. In fact, most of them cut their teeth on coding at the same time that I started coding. However, after about 10 years or so of coding, most of them end up getting promoted to a supervisory or managerial level and they stop coding then as their jobs become more people focused.

However, I have not. As a result, I have about double their active programming experience. I am stunned when they tell me that I lack experience, which is something that I tend to hear often. Once I hear that though, I tend to just walk away as the person hiring me is obviously an idiot. If the hiring manager is in their 50s or older, the situation is worse as they would already have been in management positions when programming became prevalent and probably never wrote much in terms of production code in their lives.

As another example, we were filtering a bunch of resumes and my manager highlighted that one of the freshers claimed to have a lot of programming experience and wrote lots of applications while he was a kid in school. My manager was dismissive of such ‘experience’. So, I told my manager that when faced with such a CV, we should actually probe and question this person’s work to find out if he/she actually wrote any useful or good code. If they did, then it should be considered as fair ‘experience’ even if it was done before they graduated from school.

I happily told my manager that I probably wrote better code when I was a kid that this manager and a whole host of other managers, directors and chiefs, write today. Something like coding is a craft and the quality of craftsmanship increases with experience but experience is measured in years of practicing the craft, and not years of living on the planet. This is not to say that we do not have late bloomers but we should not just dismiss the person’s experience due to his lack of age.

In addition, I recently approached a technical training company to become a part-time trainer. I am looking to supplement my income and found out that training pays quite well. So, I started exchanging emails with several of the Principals of this training company and things seemed to be going well. They must have had this image of me as a gray-haired industry veteran. Then, I decided to let them know my age because I know that age is a factor in Malaysia. After that, deafening silence.

I can understand why some people want to promote ‘experience’ as an euphemism for ‘age’. It is a defense mechanism employed by senior people who fear losing out to the new crop of young turks coming out each year. However, if we want to progress as a society, we need to recognise that although some people may be young, they may actually have spent more time in the trenches honing their skills and talents than us. Such skills and talent should not be wasted on the altar of ageism.

However, survival is the basest of human instincts. So, I don’t really blame people for practicing ageism. It’s just that I will not practice it in my organisation and in order to do that, I must make sure that I never ever have a HR department at my organisation and to have radical HR policies.

Update@2010-09-01: The silence has been broken.