Musings

I don’t speak very clearly. If you have ever hear me speak, it’s as if the words could not get out of my mouth fast enough. Words slur into one another. I also have a bad habit of mixing my timing and rhythm when speaking, despite having English as my first language. This makes my usual rather flat accent into something that sounds very jumbled. While I would attribute the mixing of timing and rhythm to the rather odd rhythm my brain is used to, this is not very good for communicating, especially with people who are not used to my speech patterns. [Read More]

I had an interesting discussion with a bunch of people earlier today. Don’t really remember their names now. But we had an interesting discussion over beer any how. We started talking about the typical dalliances of running a startup, but as any hacker will tell you, such discussion inevitably end up being a wankfest over what languages are the best * It’s clearly Haskell /sarcasm .

The discussion eventually went there. And one of the people in the group talked about how he had switched stacks from a Python stack into a node.js stack and is now considering moving back into the Python or Go stack. When asked why, the response was simply “Javascript sucks”.

[Read More]

I use a lot of image-macro-like emoticons in my group chatroom in Hipchat. In particular, I tend to use rage faces a lot in my chat. These internet memes have spread way past 4chan and reddit into the pedantry of 9gag and your mum, and upon introspection I found it quite interesting I use rage face memes a lot in my chat. I’ve never really bothered with the memes on the internet. I’ve been around since the days of the dancing baby * yes I will admit that I am guilty of having gif images of dancing babies in my early websites... that and hamster dance gifs , and I’m not really interested in chasing more memes - I am aware of most of them, but I don’t use them. My rather excessive use of rage faces in my chats, however, presents a totally different reality.

I joked about this a few days ago on Facebook - that I use internet memes so much in my daily communication that I might as well go around shouting “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra”.

[Read More]

I read this from Dan Crow, about how Apple has hit its peak this morning:

Steve was famous for his “reality distortion field”. I saw it up close and personal, and it was amazing. But Steve knew that when he turned on the hype, he needed an outstanding product to back it up. The reason he could seemingly bend reality to his will was that products like the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad really were exceptional, breakthrough products. Steve’s showmanship was justified

I followed with a discussion with Simon about this issue. He agrees with that statement whereas I mentioned that all Apple has to be is be outstanding enough, where as other companies won’t do well with just being outstanding enough as they lack Apple’s reality distortion field. He then brings up the fact that ‘outstanding’ means a different thing to different people. Which was what I disagreed on.

Coincidentally I was reading Dustin Curtis’ blog post about seeking the best. In the HN discussions, he too brought up that ‘the best’ means a different thing to different people. Again, on this, I disagree.

[Read More]

TL;DR: The fastest method of loading passengers onto a plane is to group passengers based on the oddness/evenness of their seat row numbers. Board passengers with odd numbered rows through one door, and passengers with even numbered rows through another door.

I went to Melbourne last weekend for GP Melbourne (don’t ask – I lost badly). But I very nearly didn’t get there. My flight was originally at 5pm, so at 2pm, I decided to do a web check-in. To my surprise, I found that Jetstar had changed my flight from 5pm to 11pm without actually telling me. I checked all my email archives, and I had not received any communiques aside from their stupid weekly sales email. I had a dinner meeting in Melbourne at 8, it was unacceptable that I leave Sydney at 11pm. So I called Jetstar, and after a frantic 40 minutes, I managed to get my flight changed to 7pm. I had still missed the meeting though.

Anyway, so I was at the airport, having had 2 hours sleep the previous night, waiting, half asleep for my flight. Then came an announcement – that there was going to be a delay in the flights. I felt slightly frustrated, but I was short of sleep and felt tired, so I didn’t bother. When it came to boarding however, I was surprised, as Jetstar had changed their boarding method. I thought about it for a while and then I tweeted about what I thought to be Jetstar’s inefficient boarding method:

This method of boarding the flight is inefficient. Off the top of my head I can think oof at least 1 better way. #jetstar

— Chewxy (@chewxy) March 30, 2012

If I werent so sleepy I'd work out the math to show that this method of boarding can be improved. #jetstar #fail

— Chewxy (@chewxy) March 30, 2012

Despite that, I did work on a simulation while on the flight. I fell asleep after the first few lines of code of course, but on my trip back from Melbourne, I completed the code but never actually ran it… until today. You see, I didn’t think about it for a while until yesterday and today, when I received a number of Twitter mentions. I hadn’t checked my twitter mentions earlier, and hadn’t noticed Jetstar actually replied to my tweet:

@chewxy Sorry to hear boarding is a bit slow. Please send details of your method to our Customer Care Team: http://t.co/yNEdKbmS We'd (cont)

— Jetstar Airways (@JetstarAirways) March 30, 2012

[Read More]

At work, the milk frother had started acting up again. No one was having their morning coffee. And everyone was cranky. Our milk frother came as a set with the coffee machine – a Nespresso Gemini CS 20 – was making milk bubbles instead of foam for our cappucinos. Not keen on waiting on a Nespresso technician, various colleagues have taken to trying to fix the machine themselves. Alas, their efforts were to no avail. I came onto the scene, stared at the machine for a while, thought for a bit, and accurately deduced the problem.

Now, lest you think this is a self-congratulatory tale of my own brilliance, rest assured it is not. Instead, it is a cautionary tale about pragmatism. 

[Read More]

I had been watching Ten’s latest offering – Can of Worms, and one of today’s questions was “Is the burqa out of place in Australia?”.  And then I tweeted this:

the burqa is dehumanizing, and alienating – the burqa is immoral. But echoing Don Burke, I’d fight for the rights [for women] to wear it. #canofburqas

140 characters, unfortunately is not enough for anyone to expound their thoughts, or even qualify their statements, and so I thought I’d blog about it more.

First things first, let’s get the initial question out of the way – yes, I think the burqa is out of place in Australia, and pretty much any where else in the world, even in Afghanistan.  It is out of place both in Australia and anywhere in the world because what it stands for is immoral.

[Read More]

Lately, I have been questioning my own actions. Actually, for the majority of the last month I have been bogged down by a lot of work, and a lot of work means I start questioning myself a lot more – my sanity, my ethics, etc. I meditate a lot, and I can quite confidently say that I am quite fully aware and mindful of my own thoughts, which of late has become more of the “YOU ARE A CRAZY PERSON” thoughts.

So, I decided to write them down, and today I am publishing it, because hey, the Internet needs more pollution, amiright?

In the past, when I faced exams, I rarely panicked, even if I was severely underprepared (incidentally the only exam I ever panicked for was also the only exam I failed). The moment after the exam though, the panic sets in. Thankfully for me, I had fairly solid basics – toss me any derivatives and given enough time I could work it out. Which worked out okay for me in exams – because you know, there was a set syllabus, and the curviest of curveballs I ever had was a sneaky metric spaces question in a microeconomics mid-semester exam.

Right now, my life is going past me at breakneck speed, and like exams in the past, I am not panicky.  And this troubles me greatly. 

[Read More]

A few months ago a Christian friend posted a note on Facebook, and I replied. He however, has not chosen to respond properly, opting to dismiss everything I wrote as “It is sad when one can’t see the forest for the trees”, which quickly degenerated any possible discourse into nothing substantial. Reproduced here are the exact original post and my response. Since I also respect the said person’s privacy, I have chosen to not reproduce his full name.

Original post – Atheism is a Faith & Agnosticism willful ignorance:

An agnostic will rightly say of God that ‘we cannot know’ if he exists. I agree, and I can’t prove that he does exist – so in a sense I am agnostic – but I differ in that I believe he does. The fence-sitting agnostic however has to actively and wilfully ignore the topic of God altogether, and I cannot say that they are right or wrong for doing so – only that should they continue, they might find out too late. An Atheist, on the other hand, ‘cannot know’ that God does not exist because they cannot prove it.

As much as I have a faith that God is real, the atheist has a faith that he is not real. Atheism, therefore, is not a lack of belief in God, but a proactive decision to believe he does not exist – which by virtue awards it no lesser or greater merit than any other faith.

The idea that Atheism & Science go hand in hand and that consequently Atheism is somehow more intelligent & less ignorant is misleading and deceptive. Scientific discovery can for the atheist lend support to his/her beliefs, and for the Christian lend support to his/her beliefs.

Of-course I want others to have what I have, or else why would I have it myself? But regardless of your stance please give careful thought to what Science is, and what it is not. It is a limited and finite tool by which we can discover many things, but not all things.

[Read More]

So, my girlfriend and I were watching the 7pm Project just before MasterChef started today, and there was a segment about organ donation. Naturally, my ears perked up. I’ve always had been interested in organ donation. Call it a perverse interest, but I like to think about how to match up organ donors to recipients – an obsession undoubtedly sparked by Al Roth. Amongst the thoughts of organ donation, I too often think about stuff like the liquidity of the organ market – that is to say, how many willing/able organs are there which at any given moment are able to be donated – and how to increase such liquidity. Of course, when such questions posed in a less-than-delicate manner, had led some colleagues of mine to wonder if I am actually sane * I’m not crazy, my mother had me tested . Today I’ll talk about some of my views on organ donation.

Here’s the 7pm Project video in question (starts about 5 minutes in):

[Read More]