Archive for November, 2007
All these are academic exercise
November 30th, 2007 atschool
As the lecturer meandered into trading stratagies with a student, some one put their head down. Another took off the glasses to rub the eyes. 9pm on a friday, after four days of classes, nobody was bright-eyed and eager now.
“Be careful now,” said Dr Sy after he explained the makings of a synthetic short futures. “What is the disadvantage of this strategy? Eileen you should know this.”
I shook my head.
“All these are academic exercise. Life is tough. Who can tell me the biggest disadvantage? Plus two points on your exam.”
Only the computers were computing
One Note 2007
November 30th, 2007 atschool
At work I use a modified MonkeyGTD for general note taking. For school work, I’ve discovered OneNote which is much nicer and better suited for the way I study. There probably other very user-friendly outlining programs but I find One Note most suitable because I put blocks of notes all over the place in my study. For research work, where I need to be a bit more ordered, I can easily pick up items online for journal abstracts and citations or if I wish, print them all to OneNote. My organisation is similar to this method described but I tend not to have stuff like how much to pass, etc. It seems that one could also implement GTD in OneNote via the Flagging System, which I think would be useful at exam review times where I can pick them up to autosummarise.
Literary anecdotes: The Stories Behind the Titles
November 19th, 2007 books
Cain described how one day Lawrence was telling him how nervous he had been after mailing off his first play to a producer:
‘Then, he said, “I almost went nuts. I’d sit and watch for the postman, and then I’d think, you got to cut this out, and then when I left the window I’d be listening for his ring. How I’d know it was the postman was that he’d always ring twice.”
‘He went on with more of the harrowing tale, but I cut in on him suddenly. I said: “Vincent, I think you’ve given me a title for that book.”
“What’s that?”
“The Postman Always Rings Twice.”
“Say, he rang twice for Chambers, didn’t he?”
“That’s the idea.”
“And on that second ring, Chambers had to answer, didn’t he? Couldn’t hide out in the backyard any more.”
“His number was up, I’d say.” ‘
This would be the end of the story behind The Postman Always Rings Twice were it not for the fact that there is no postman in the book, no doorbell, and no ring. Frank Chambers does not ‘hide out in the backyard’, nor does he ‘have to answer’. Neither is there any prior version of the book in which any of these things occur.
Cain, it seems, was speaking metaphorically. The book is structured around two main events: the murder of the husband and the death of the wife. Chambers had a hand in both of them, but after the second death, ‘his number was up’, ‘he couldn’t hide’. He had played deaf to the first ring, but was forced to respond to the second. The ‘postman’ was fate, nemesis, retribution, divine justice; and the parcel that awaited Frank was the recorded delivery of his own demise.
Lost in a Good Book
November 18th, 2007 books
Weekend amusement is a book by Jasper Fforde on the famous detective Thursday Next: Lost In A Good Book. It’s cute and goes well with chocolates and quiet Sundays.
Van Helsing’s Gazette: Did you do much SEB containment work?
Agent Stoker: Oh yes. The capture of Supreme Evil Beings, or SEB, as we call them, is the main bread-and-butter work for SO-17. Quite how there can be more than one Supreme Evil Being I have no idea. Every SEB I ever captured considered itself not only the worst personification of unadulterated evil that ever stalked the earth. It must have been quite a suprise – and not a little galling – to be locked away with several thousand other SEBs, all pretty much the same, in row upon row of plain glass jars at the Loathsome Id Containment Facility. I don’t know where they came from. I think they leak in from elsewhere, the same way as a leaky tap drips water. (laughs) They should replace the washer.
Of The Trial:
“This is preposterous.”
“No, this is Kafka.”
The most puzzling is this:
“Closest yet, Mr Flex. If you have to ask, then you never understand. To Neanderthal, sunset is only finish-day. Van Gogh’s Green Rye is merely a poor depiction of a field. The only sapien painters we truely understand are Pollock or Kandinsky; they speak our language. Our paintings are not for you.”
Did Fforde like and admire abstract artists Pollack and Kandinsky but did not understand them or is this a little dig? The Great Interweb shows up nothing.
The Pillowman
November 18th, 2007 theatre
A good piece of theatre is something like a good sleep: refreshes the mind, excites it with dreams; when you have it you think little of it, but lacking it makes living desperately miserable. This year is a fabulous theatre year for me. Not a lot of shows but the ones I’ve seen are very good. The Pillowman has a good strong story line. The multimedia stuff does surprisingly add value to the story (instead of being fluff). I’m really impressed with Adrian Pang this time. He was really focussed, only twice had personality switch during the show – both times when he was telling the story of the old chinese man in the tower. (Channeling his tv character?) Shane Mardjuki is a bit bland, I thought. He shouted a lot and was being angry and violent all the time but I couldn’t feel he was at all menacing. He completely wasted the heartbreaking bits at the end, which was a shame. I didn’t like Daniel Jenkins – thought he tended towards overacting. Michael Corbidge is absolutely wonderful. He stands apart. I hope he gets an award and an obscenely undeserving sum of money so that he never stops acting.
I’m keen on watching it again but it seems that the entire run is sold out. That, I’ve not seen in a while. I take back what I’d said about local theatre. Heh.
Discriminatory service at coffee shops
November 17th, 2007 Uncategorized
Tim Hartford reports the findings of American economist Caitlin Knowles Myers that women wait longer at coffee shops. One might share the same viewpoints as a Starbucks Gossip’s commentor Bearista:
As many have noted women usually ask for weirder, tougher to make drinks than men. Also, and more frustratingly… women dig in their little coach wallets for every little penny to make exact change while the customers behind them sigh with annoyance.
Intuitively, it’s probably true but only at coffee chains such as Starbucks, Coffee Bean and Tea Leaves, or Spinelli where the drinkers are in less of a hurry to get in on time (perhaps being higher up the food chain themselves). Think of let’s say, the coffee shop next to the building where you work where all men/women, regardless of the place in the food chain, will be glared at if there is chatting and purse rummaging in the front of the queue. According to the research, longer wait for women remained even when study controls for drink preferences (complicated vs easy).
From the study:
The gender differential in wait times is estimated to decline with the presence of female employees. In a coffee shop with all male employees, a female customer waits an average of 37 seconds longer for her order than a male customer. However, in a coffee shop with all female employees a female customer
Nostalgia
November 15th, 2007 Uncategorized
My parents going off on holiday without me reminds me of the time that I was a little girl, my plumpy arms thrusting out from the iron gates grasping at nothing and crying because I’m left at a babysitter’s home.
A line on the msn with V., made me search for Joshua Kadison on the internet. His ballads were always sweet. From his letters:
I wanted to share my experience of those dark days so that maybe others with similar experiences might be able to see that we are never alone in our hard times even if we think we are… Yes, it was the hardest time in my life, but then I can also say, having made it through the changes, it’s now one of the most sublime times in my life. “Ups and downs, kiddos.” That’s what a divinely painted old lady in the grocery store check-out line said a couple weeks ago to no one in particular. And I knew she was talking just to me. I bet you everyone in that line felt the same way. They knew she was talking just to them.
To think is to forget
November 14th, 2007 popscience
In his short story “Funes the Memorious,” Jorge Luis Borges describes a man crippled by an inability to forget. He remembers every detail of his life, but he can’t distinguish between the trivial and the important. He can’t prioritize, he can’t generalize. He is “virtually incapable of general, platonic ideas.” Perhaps, as Borges concludes in his story, it is forgetting, not remembering, that is the essence of what makes us human. “To think,” Borges writes, “is to forget.”
In my days, it’s called daydreaming and procrastination
November 11th, 2007 Uncategorized
Searching for methods to improve concentration, I found several articles on ADHD predominantly inattentive and this makes me want to cry big dramatic as-seen-on-Oprah tears. PBS website outlines some strategies other than stimulants to improve concentration. (What would become of one’s personality if not for such quirks?)
