Price Increase and Why it Mattters to all of us

Have you heard of the song "Blame it on the Rain?". It's from Milli Vanilli, and it's sometimes being played at Red FM.

I've been protesting for price increase these few days. The only thing that I talked about during breakfast and lunch is price increase.

So It matters. But constructively, as Malaysians, let's not blame everyone for the price increase.
(Of course, if you asked me why the price increase, I have a lot more to tell).

Here's what you can do to reduce inflation without making noise to government :

1. Don't eat too much rice. Cut your meal from 3 to 2 times a day.
2. Pump petrol at Petronas. Petronas can help on petrol subsidies and other things
3. Don't spend too much on imported goods. Buy local products.
4. Change your lifestyle to a positive, frugal life style with reasonable spending.
5. Don't buy house now. Buy later when the price is stable
6. Buy second hand car. If you want to buy new car, buy Proton
7. Cut on electricity bills. Consume less water.
8. Do more work with less effort. For example, use tools to chop off trees. This increase productivity.

I can go on and on, but as ordinary Joe and Jane, other than lamenting yourselves on price increase, you won't go anywhere.
Our government now can't handle subsidies like we used to (maybe they don't do good planning as compared to before).

And please stop asking for pay raise, unless our productivity match our pay. Otherwise, it's just bad for everyone of us.

Work, Relax, Farming

This year was different from last year. Last year, I've spent half of 2007 (yes, almost full time) to organize Discover. That was equal to about 7 months of labor of love, with much of the spending come out of my savings. Some of the expenses, I forgot to claim, or, I lost the receipts (that was my mistake, rather).

Anyway, this year, I've decided to work, and work very hard (I'm not a smart person, so I don't really work smart. The only time I work smart is, when I can write a script that can automate some mundane tasks before throwing away the script). I came to work on weekends too. There are times when I just work and work, although, I don't really need to do as much work. But I like the job that I have right now. I'm always fascinated by it, and I just keep working.

I don't know when I want to relax a little bit, but I think it's too premature to even think about relax from work. I'm a restless person, so I tend to work until I get tired. If I don't work at office, I'll work at home.

The only time I don't work, is when I watch movies, and do some farming and planting work, on the weekends. I love farming. That's the first thing I enjoy since I was a kid (I have no PC when I was growing up as a kid, so farming is the best thing). The best time is when you see the seeds that you plant actually respond to the nature and growing up. It's like watching a little baby growing. The next best thing is to see when the fruits or flowers come out of it. I have a joy of my life watching them.

Farming comes first in my hobby list. The only problem now is that, I have no land to farm here in Penang. That's when I missed home. Farming with my dad is the best thing ever happen to me every month.

Surf's Up

"Surf's Up" is a really good animated movie. For me.

The whole movie is making fun (I don't know whether it's making fun or not), but the whole movie is actually in the reality TV show format. It started with a penguin called Cody Maverick, who was inspired by Big-Z, a supposedly legend of the whole world of penguin surfers.

Cody surfs. All day.

His mission is to get out of his very boring hometown called "Shiverpool" in Antartica (where else penguins live?), where his big brother, Glen, always ridicules him for surfing all day and good for nothing. I can feel the frustration that Cody has. At some point, I feel like Cody too if I was bullied like that. But Cody is proud of him for being a surfer. For him, it's all about being somebody like Big-Z. Cody always wanted to be like Big-Z. For him, Big-Z is everything and he'll do everything for it.

Anyway, that's the opening. You might not realized it, but "opening" that introduce a "hero" is very important. And it captures our imagination what's going to happen. How Cody is going to be like Big-Z? Is he going to go out of Shiverpool? How? What's the ending?

Well, this is how. A talent agent (trust me) came to look for the best surfer in the whole Antartica and that's when Cody got picked up to Pen Gu island.

The only surprising thing (and I didn't really expect) is that, he actually found Big-Z and learned from him, and the best thing is that, Cody develops his own style. I don't want to go analyze into the detail, but the best scene (and quite philosophical) is when he learned how to make the board before he surfs. That's the best. I love it.

Anyway, I found that the movie took some references from the original skateboard (1970s) documentary: Dogtown and Z-Boys (that's probably where the Big-Z name came up). I've seen that documentary, and it's really great.

To understand the context of Surf's Up movie, you might want to watch that documentary.

By the way, Surf's Up is a title of an album of The Beach Boys. You can also visit Cody's myspace here: Cody Maverick Myspace page

Proton, Neutron, Electron, and the moon

I still remember those days when I learned science/ "Sains Teras" (I never take physics or chemistry in high-school. I never take a formal chemistry course in my entire life). In the modern atom model (that is, Bohr-Rutherford atom model), we have three curious elements: proton, neutron and electron.

I've so far underestimated what all these means really. And what profound impact in my life. Actually, these particles are not the only basic particles that we have in our universe. There are also some of the particles like neutrinos, muons, etc. However, I've never learned this before in Malaysian high-school, so I didn't know their existence till very recently.

Anyway, I'm constantly fascinated with these three basic elements of an atom. Think about it, how could protons and neutrons have such a very strong binding energy, while electrons, with sufficient force applied to it, can move freely and join another atom structure. When they move around, they create the electric current that power up our daily lives. Think of a day without these electrons going around. Can you imagine that?? Think about the fascination that's going on here. I haven't gone to the magnetic field.

These things amazed me all the time.

First of all - binding energy between proton and neutron. Why the binding energy? Why these two elements are bounded with a very strong energy? Where is the energy comes from in the first place? Why proton and neutron has to be together, while electron can go as freely as it likes? Does this bother you? I mean, not in a negative way, but in a fascinating way.

Can we split the proton and neutron? (Yes, if you split these two element, you'll release the binding energy, and if you can produce a "chain reaction" that is, splitting the next atom and again and again, you've successfully produced the powerful "atomic bomb").

I used to think that the electrons that orbiting the neutrons and protons in an atom is something similar to the moon circulating the earth. However, to think in parallel of atom model, what's the probability that the moon can go off track and go some other planet's gravitational force and stick with the planet? Is that possible? It may be possible to likened the moon and the earth as the electron and proton. But how about the binding energy? Where do we want to put the neutron, which the mass, is somewhat equal to the proton? How about the radiation effect that we detected in radium,etc?

It turns out that these two models (atom and planetary) are not equivalent. There may look the same (if you think about it), but moon is unlikely to go off track and go to Uranus. (Unless God wants it).

Here's a hypothetical, or maybe a sci-fi question for you: Given the knowledge of atom properties, can we move the moon (I mean the earth's moon that we see at night) somewhere else? Maybe make earth's gravitational force so big (definitely bigger than 9.8 m/s₂ ) so that it comes nearer?

At any rate, my childhood dream has always been to go to the moon. I wish I can get there.

USA for Students event

I would like to promote an event that I helped volunteered last year. The event is called "USA for Students". Please check the website here: http://www.usaforstudents.org/

When we first started (which I was also part of the organizing Committee), it was called "Experiences 2006 Kuala Lumpur". Last year, we decided to change the name to "Discover U.S Education -'07". I was partly responsible for the name "Discover". The reason is because, I strongly believe in the discovery process of oneself, especially during college times.

We sometimes don't know what to do in our lives. I mean, I was there, so I know how it feels.
It's fine if parents wants to give directions on certain way their kids are supposed to do in college. For example, they want to give their kids education to prepare them for a promising carrier.

However, if the students wants to take this advice as it is (which they sometimes do) they need to think again. There are so much thing to experience in college that some people don't have the opportunity to experience. If we're starting to think about jobs before we're even entering college, we most likely don't like our studies life, and blame ourselves if we have bad hair days during work (that if you found the job that you're looking for. What if you're not?).

If you're about to enter college, please give yourself a chance. Work is a different story. You can work as whatever you like, but study is different. We should discover ourselves. Put yourself in a position that you want to do something cool in your life. Give it a try (take course, do part time, whatever) during college. For example, I used to think that I want to make a movie, so I went to take Cinema class (I'm majoring in computer science. As usual, you don't always get to do what you want in your life, so College is the time).

How about "Education"
I'm also a strong believer in "education". What's a big deal about this? Here's the big deal:
Society sometimes mistakenly believe that "Education" equals to "Learning". This is wrong. In Malays, education is called "Pendidikan" whereas learning is"Pelajaran". So "Education" is "Pendidikan" and "Learning" is "Pelajaran". Remember that.

So if you "educate", you're basically "mould" someone into something that is supposed to be (or what the society or world perceive to be) for their entire life. Why I say "entire life"? Because you're exposing something, "educate", during their formative years. As you probably suspect, formative years are very important.

So to have someone to "learn", you need to "teach", and if you teach, you can just teach a specific thing like, teaching algebra, or why we need to know Maxwell equations.

But to educate, you go even further: At the end of the day, how do you care about using these Maxwell equations? How could it be use? How can we use it in a right way? Is it good for society? How can we manipulate these stuff into something better in the future? To educate, we form a thinking body. Thinking even further. For the future, for life, for the good of society, and humanity and take actions on it.

That's education. Education is something very special. It is not mere learning.

OK, so I care about discovery and education. Big deal?

The event that I helped organized was designed to have a face-to-face interaction with the people that have been studying in the U.S and familiar with U.S Education. I'm not saying that U.S Education is the best education system in the world. What I would like, we, Malaysians to do, is to take advantage of the U.S. Education ecosystem here in Malaysia and learn where we could see fit in our society, and we should also be learning and benefiting from the U.S. Education. I won't go into much detail how I get educated in the U.S. and so on (different people has different opinions, so my opinion is that, it is a great learning experience. Maybe I will post in a separate blog post later).

For those of you who are studying in the U.S and have studied in the U.S and would like to represent your school, please register at
http://www.usaforstudents.org/registration/registerExhibitor.php
and please contact your respective university to get the brochures and some school logo or something to cheer up the event (if you have been to Discover last year, you knew what I mean).
Anyway, I see you in KL!

The worst cough

I can't remember the worst cough that I've ever had in my entire life. To be honest, I rarely have bad cough. But it's really weird. I've been coughing for about a week now and there's no sign of getting better. I hope this is not the direct result of consuming too much Durian a few weeks ago. I'm trying to convince myself that that's Durian is not the reason. (could it be?)

I went to a clinic last weekend and the doctor told me that I'm getting a fever, allergic and so on (although I don't feel like I'm having fever). I'm kind of having a fever, if my cough gets really bad.

Now, all the medication finished. The doctor said that if it's not improving, I should do X-Ray. The problem is, I'm not really a big fan of fancy medication, so for now, I'm resorting to some more traditional approach.

I asked someone what's the best "ubat batuk", so the suggestion is "Ubat Batuk Cap Ibu Dan Anak". I haven't really tried it, but I think I'm about to. For now, what I'm doing is try to get a lot more fresh air, get home early from work, and try not to eat and drink some fried stuff.
Basically, I can't even eat roti canai, or even drinking Milo. It's a really hard diet because I'm used to consume those things almost everyday.

I'm now consuming a type of "asam" called "asam boy". It's an orange color, and you can find it in some "asam" stores near your place. I live in Penang, so these kind of thing is easy to get.

The worst is when at night. When I cough, it gets really bad I feel like jumping out of the window. Same thing when I'm working. I can't focus when it gets worse. That's when I feel like I want to be healthy.

I now realized that the word: "health is wealth" is real, after all.

Plank Constant

I like Physics, but I never really like to take Physics tests because most of the time, I flunk them.

Anyway, I'm sure you've heard about Quantum Theory? If you don't really have any idea about it, or you've forgotten about it, you can start reading on a constant called "Plank Constant".

It's really interesting to see that the Plank Constant actually has energy and time incorporated into it. Basically, that the "energy of vibrating molecules is quantized". It means, it's not continuous , but it jumps from one level of energy to the next level of energy. How does this make sense? What we've learned so far is that, all things matters continue. For example, if I throw a ball up on the air, the ball doesn't jump from one level to next level (even if you throw it up on staircase), it "continues" and you can specifically point out the coordinate where exactly the ball is at any instant. But Max Plank's idea doesn't go by this logic.

Basically, what he says is that, at any point, the energy level jumps from one stage to another. This doesn't really go well with classical physics that we've learned in high school. Imagine you're throwing a ball up on the air, and the ball jumps from one level to next level. Maybe you say I'm crazy.

If you see carefully, the constant really doesn't make any sense. It seems like a random number multiplied by another small random number (it's in Joule.seconds):



( Reference )

Max Plank's work precedes the rest of the more interesting concept in Physics that we have today. He basically discovers the Physics for the new century.

The Sisterhood of Travelling Pants

You know I got this movie for a while and I never really care about watching it until yesterday.
The problem is that, the title seems to suggest that this is probably movie for girls, because it's a Sisterhood stuff. You know, maybe sometime later.

So last night about 10pm, I didn't really know what to do already. I kind of get bored with Astro channels, so, what the heck, I'll watch the movie.

The beginning of the story is kind of, you know, girls talk about their shirts and things, and I just kind of entertain it and watch it anyway.

However, when it comes to the part when they found the pants and make the pledge to bow to a few rules when wearing it during their summer holidays, the movie gets quite interesting. The reason is because the movie (and I'm about to apply some movie critic skill here), have this concept of parallelism in the story, where the story actually splits into 4 stories, and they're all connected -- guess what -- through the pants!

So the pants is a "token" that gets around. Token is very important, as you can see in a lot of movies. You know, husband give the ring to wife, a lover give a love letter to another lover, a father give a pair of shoes to their sons, and all sorts of tokens. Token serves as a connecting point between characters. That's what make a movie so interesting. Because some characters share a same token in some way or the other, it's related.

And as the Sisterhood movies goes, this token gets around. The way is that, the four friends ship their pants around after wearing it for about a week (I think) via post. So as we can imagine, the friendships gets better when they receive the pants. The pants is supposed to do some magic when you're wearing it. So there's this time when a friend fall in love because the pants gets stuck down under the sea and a handsome Greek guy saves her, and all sorts of things.

The parallelism in the story work out great because the pants, the connecting token, gets around and do something to the person who wear it. Different person has a different story to tell, but it shares the same concept. Found who they love, what they care, and after that, conflict among themselves and work out on some sort of resolutions.

The only thing that I want to disagree (well, it doesn't really matter), is that, a viewer is supposed to be watching the stories in Carmen's perspective. However, viewer doesn't really connected to Carmen. Carmen's character is not strong enough to influence the overall drama in the movie. Although I can see she's trying, I think Bridgette is done much better job, except that she broke down at the end of the story.

The good part is that, the endings ends with Carmen's story. So Carmen's story actually went beyond the other Sisters story, and that is sort of wrapping up the overall movie stories. I still think that the movie could give much more impact if Carmen's character could influence more of the rest of the characters and have a sort of connecting ending, but it didn't happen.

Anyway, it's a good movie if you have time to waste before going to bed.

Durian Season is here

So I was having the most intense "Durian Eating" last weekend with some friends of mine.
The story goes when we went hiking and we were talking about everything, from nature, politics, to food.

And suddenly, we kind of jump off and say, "Hey, let's go eat Durian", when we were having breakfast. I thought they were joking. One of us called up a friend who happens to have a Durian Farm. He mentioned that the best Durian is Malaysian Durians (of course -lah, what else, right?). And the best Durians are the ones from Balik Pulau, Penang.

But, bad news. Balik Pulau doesn't have much Durian. We thought we can go somewhere else and grab some durians anywhere anyway, so we're all set to meet up again at 3pm.

Plan changed - we'll go to Seberang because one of the new YB was opening their service center, and so they have some free Durians there. Without further thinking, we changed our gear and went across the celebrated Penang Bridge to go eat Free Durians.

Again, bad news. We were a little bit too late because we lost our way (although they all blamed me because I was about 10 minutes late to arrive to meet before leaving, thanks to Bukit Jambul hiking overdose). The Durian are almost gone - and I'm fortunate to have a slice of Durian. (but it was breathtaking if you think about it).

We then was having a talk with the guy who furiously helping out to open the Durian for everyone. It turns out that they bought all the Durians from him, so he ask us to go to his place called "Junjong" (Don't ask me where is it, I think it's close to Kulim because they have a Kulim signboard there).

OK, finally, the moment of truth. We sit down, talk a little bit and that's it. They opened the Durians and we weren't thinking about anything anymore. I think this is the first time I eat Durian this much since I came back from US (Counting my years in the US, that was about 7 years ago). How delighted am I, I couldn't expressed it with my words.

All I say is that, get a taste of Durian before it's too late. Don't forget to eat the Manggis too after you ate a lot of them. You might get high if you loose control.

"Damn, it feels good to be a Gangsta"

Sometimes, you just feel like you want to do something different. In fact, I've always wanted to do it.For example, when all the people use the same brand of car, somehow, I don't really feel special for using the same brand of car. I want to drive something else. Whether it's old car, cheap car, expensive car, or rare species, it doesn't matter.

Similarly, when people do things in a way all nice, very good, and the way society respect (like scoring high in the exams or what not), I don't feel like doing it anymore. Because the thing is, and the point of living is probably, for me, is to make a difference. Whether to your own selves, or the life of others. Maybe what the society expect is not what we want in our life. Because, maybe you don't really fit into the society.

And the question now is, to what extent that I should make a difference? What good would be if I make this kind of difference? If the difference is very small, well, you can probably make a small difference. But when the difference is very big, then, you'll make a big difference.

Actually, when we reflect to ourselves whether or not we should really make a difference, it matters to ask ourselves what we really care. Do you care about your family? Your car? Your house? And how about the security? Do you care about those? If you care, and you want to do something about it, you should do it. I learned from a Chinese friend that, we should take some small steps before we're making a big step. The small step starts from us. That would be the beginning, and that would make all the difference.

Sometimes you wonder why people could produce some lyrics like Damn It Feels Good to Be a Gangsta . Ignore the profanity, but when you look at the end of the lyrics, it shows something
that the lyrics writer care. He's talking about something that he probably believe in, and he cares about it.

Whether it makes any difference or not in our life, could be. But it's really our call to do it.

Fun with GNU Octave

Hello World!

Let's explore the capabilities of GNU Octave. Basically, I would like to write some simple programs so that I could do some other cool stuff with GNU Octave (I don't know what is it yet). Well, it's always good to start with, guess what, hello world program!

Using my text editor, I simply write this line:

printf("hello, world \n");

and I save it as "hello.m". So to run this program, we can easily just invoke "hello" at the GNU Octave command prompt. Like this (see picture below):

Yes!, we're now a Matlab programmer. Let's put that in our resume.

Simple Calculation

Now I would like to explore the true mathematical power of Octave. The thing that I found about Octave is that, it's so easy to use. For example, at a command prompt, I can easily do mathematical computation by entering this :

octave:1> 1+2
ans = 3

As you can see, Octave doesn't need to enter into special mode of some sort to do simple calculations like this. It just sort of know how to do it. Of course, you have to get into the Octave shell to be able to do this so easily (if you still haven't gotten your GNU Octave working right, please email me). Saving this calculation in calc.m, I can execute this command like this:

octave:11> calc
ans = 3

Ah, beautiful.

Matrices

I'm sure you still remember (at least vividly) of matrix operation from your high school/college education. As we can guess, matrix operations plays significant role in mathematical computations. You may ask, "what's the good of matrix operations for me in my daily life? After all, I'm not a mathematician to begin with." Neither do I. I absolutely have no idea why I explore into this realm of computational program like Octave if I can get my job done (as in my work) in C++ or Perl, or TCL. So, the question is not so much of whether it has any practical applications as of now, as the time you're reading this writing. The question is to appreciate the beauty of matrix operations, and how cool it is to be able to do matrix operations using Octave so easily. When you know you can do something about it, you may get an idea what sort of thing you want to do with the new knowledge that you just gained.

OK, enough blabbering. Let's start trying to enter some matrix operations:

octave:17> v = [1 2 3 4]
v =

1 2 3 4

Here, I assign v as a 1x4 matrix, [1 2 3 4]. The matrix doesn't have to be 1x4 in dimension. It could also be 2x4 dimension, etc. For example, for 2x4 matrix, I can just enter:

octave:19> v = [1 2 3 4
> 1 3 4 5]

v =

1 2 3 4
1 3 4 5

As you can see, I simply enter and making a new line after [1 2 3 4 to define my next matrix entry 1 3 4 5]. The result would be a 2x4 matrix of v.

GNU Octave

Today, I would like to talk about GNU Octave.

I found GNU Octave when I was searching for free version of Matlab. I wasn't really programming in Matlab when I was at school or even work, but it occurs to me that I want to see what's in there (just curious, basically).

If you don't know what's Matlab (OK, so you're a C++ fan, or you don't need Matlab for whatever reason). All I need to say is that, the plotting is cool. I mean, I don't really do anything fancy rather than looking for some 3D examples, and go plot it. Check out the picture. Isn't it cool?

Hello

Hello.

This is my first post in my blog. I've created a few blogs before, but this one, bears my name (syamsulhasran), so I would expect to actively blogging about it. I don't really know what I would really want to do with this blog. It could be just random thought about stuff, or something very speecific, like my favorite songs. Or something like that. I don't know.

Thanks. Have fun

Syamsul