Dear reader, please take a moment to fill in the survey form below. I am conducting a personal survey on some internet shopping trends, why people shop online and how they do it. Your honest and accurate feedback would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you for your kind cooperation.
Lionel Lam
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It had been a very sad day, for today was the day my friend was laid to rest, marking the closing of the final chapter of his short yet colorful life. His passing was unexpected, and we all thought what a bright future this young man had ahead of him. Alas, that was not to be, for God loved him so much he was called to the House of the Lord last Thursday evening, Singapore time.
I knew Jonathan personally, though not as well as some of my other schoolmates. He and I used to discuss at length some of the latest computer games and strategies.
He had touched my life, and the lives of many others.
Life is so fragile.
When I learned of his passing, a day after he drew his last breath, it was a stark reality I could not accept. I had barely gotten the chance to tell him how much I appreciate his friendship, and now Jon is gone.
His passing was a real awakening for me, and probably even to those who were close to him. I realized that life is too short to squander, complaining about trivialities, whining, and procrastinating. That life is meant to be enjoyed, and cherished. That the difficulties we often encounter in life, as reminders that we still have many things to accomplish, for ourselves, and for others. That the reason why our hearts still beat in us, as the Lord’s way of reminding us, that the days we have left to roam this earth, to make a lasting impact on the lives of others, are numbered.
It is through Jon’s passing, though tragic, that I humbly believe, many people will be inspired and touched, in ways that could have not been possible if he had still been with us.
Thank you Jon for the times we had spent together. The Lord loves you.
Rest in peace my friend.
===END===
The sun sets in the west.
So it has to rise in the east.
These are truths. Yet truth is subjective, as Galileo had so well demonstrated during his lifetime, getting entangled in a web of controversy with the Catholic Church of his time.
In those days, knowing the truth was dangerous, possibly even deadly. The truth of that day was knowing that the earth was at the center of the universe. And nobody challenged that truth, except Galileo.
But our scope of understanding is limited, the vast archives of the knowledge humankind has accumulated throughout our very brief existence on this earth notwithstanding.
Our rather limited intellectual capacity as human beings to recognize some of mother nature’s laws means that we are just too human not to be repeat offenders.
Newton recognized that it is gravity that causes all things to fall to the ground. Today, we know that gravity causes all things to stay on the ground, largely because our schools tell us so.
Fire is hot, and it burns. It burns, and it cooks your meal, yet is has the potential to kill you.
If it does kill you, a chain of very predictable events will start to unfold. Your obituary gets published in the local papers. People will flock to your funeral. People will cry. And when people cry, it makes other people sad, who will also probably cry. You will be deeply missed by your loved ones. But if you died in a plane crash, gravity is to blame.
And Newton would have be proven right once again.
If you kill a man, have just taken a man from his family, made his wife a widow, and left his child fatherless. You have sowed the seeds of sorrow, planting vengeance, hate and fear into the hearts of his loved ones. You run away from the authorities, for fear of being prosecuted. You hide from the face of the sun, and stalk the streets by night. You become a fugitive. In this scenario, even the law of probability applies. Chances are, you will get caught, and get thrown into prison, or even shot or hanged, if by some chance you were born in China.
Yet, like I mentioned earlier, truth is subjective.
If the man you killed was a murderer, and you took his life because he was after the lives of your loved ones, then you are a hero. The judiciary decides that you acted in self-defense. All charges against you are dropped. You are acquitted. You are a free man. It’s no wonder lawyers always win.
But didn’t you just kill a man?
What about his family? To them, are you not a murderer too?
Maybe mother nature is constantly playing pranks on us.
Whether we like it or not, we are part of a system, and part of this system will we always be. The truth will prevail. And we belong to this truth.
===END===
(In response to Angela K.’s posting on The Malaysian Insider)
It often requires greater intelligence to abstain from making such brash judgments. I have been observing for years, how supposedly intelligent individuals fail to function properly in their daily routines, as they are not able to 'regulate their emotional valves', as in the case of "Intelligent Snob".
I have to agree with Angela K. on several issues pertaining to the manner at which education is handled in Singapore, and for that matter, in Malaysia. Our inclination to learn by rote has created a wave of graduates at the forefront of the job market, who are, to varying degrees, neither able to think critically nor creatively. For years, our institutions of higher learning have been churning out graduates who have, in the years that followed, dominated a substantial chunk of the job market, and even the education system, hence further entrenching this mentality.
I reckon, at this juncture, that “Intelligent Snob”, who graduated from Harvard as she had claimed, is intelligent enough to recognize that there are, according to Dr. Howard Earl Gardner (who happens to have graduated from Harvard too), several types of intelligences, which constitute what is known as the ‘theory of multiple intelligences’, which aims to debunk the myth that intelligence can be measured scientifically.
This very fact makes what “Intelligent Snob” had written look like an old joke (albeit a well-written one), that reeks of anger and sheer ignorance, and that of an individual who has a troubled self-esteem. “Intelligent Snob” fails to realize that it takes more than academic prowess (and recognition by virtue of one’s alma mater) to succeed in life, and inspiring stories of the lives of icons such as Albert Einstein and Thomas Edison bear testimony to this fact.
I am a Malaysian who is due to graduate from Universiti Teknologi Malaysia this August. Does that make me any ‘lesser’? Think before you write.
By Lionel Lam Song Poh
Further reading:
http://www.asiaone.com/News/Education/Story/A1Story20090707-153400.html
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This is a bloody hoax. And it is, as it had been circulating around the internet for a good 10 years or more.
It is so very annoying. Bill Gates giving away his fortune? If that is true, he would now probably be sleeping in the streets or under some bridge. I am very sure many of you have received an email that looks like the one shown below.
*****
Dear Friends,
Please do not take this for a junk letter. Bill Gates is sharing his fortune. If you ignore this you will repent later. Microsoft and AOL are now the largest Internet comp ani es and in an effort to make sure that Internet Explorer remains the most widely used program, Microsoft and AOL are running an e-mail beta test.
When you forward this e-mail to friends, Microsoft can and will track it (if you are a Microsoft Windows user) for a two week time period.
For every person that you forward this e-mail to, Microsoft will pay you $245.00, for every person that you sent it to that forwards it on, Microsoft will pay you $243.00 and for every third person that receives it, you will be paid $241.00. Within two weeks!, Microsoft will contact you for your address and then send you a cheque.
*****
There may be some variations in the above version, but the stories are fundamentally similar. I admit to having fallen victim to this notorious hoax many years ago, but who can blame a 13-year-old who had just gotten his first computer? The problem is that many a times I usually receive this email from friends who usually belong (apparently) to the right portion of a intelligence distribution curve.
There are people who are supposedly mature (and intelligent) enough yet fail to understand that in there is no free lunch in this world.
Even if Bill Gates did intend to pay that amount of money for every email sent and received, there are some nagging issues as to why this fact cannot possibly hold water:
1. The world population currently stands at close to 7 billion people. The global average internet penetration rate, as of March 2009 is 23.8 percent (http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm), and that accounts for some 1.6 billion people. If 2 in every 10 persons of these1.6 billion people forward the email to an additional 5 persons (they usually forward to everyone in their address books anyway), that accounts for some 320,000,000 persons forward that email to 5 times that amount, assuming that every one of these 5 persons are unique. This is further compounded by the fact that this email has been (and still is) in circulation for more than a decade, almost guaranteeing that every single internet-user on earth has seen this email at least once. If say, a ‘modest’ number of people, 50 million, for instance, actually did receive a check of USD 200 from Bill Gates for forwarding this mail in the time-span of 1 year, that makes a total of 10 billion dollars to give away every year, and that is a huge chunk of Microsoft’s annual revenues. This is also one reason why Ponzi schemes eventually fail.
2. The second reason is a total no-brainer: Isn’t it easier to just give it away the good old-fashioned way? For that reason, there is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Simple and convenient, and it certainly beats forwarding spam and wasting server resources.
Identifying Spam
Spam is relatively easy to identify. More often that not, spam is often characterized by three common traits:
It always pays to have good email habits. What then do you do when you encounter spam? My uncle’s 3-step ‘Guaranteed-To-Eliminate-Spam’ technique would suit most people. The steps are:
Additionally, be careful with whom you share your email with. If you have to provide your email address, like signing up for email newsletters, make sure there is an option to unsubscribe in the future.
Thou Shall Not Forward Spam…
If there was room for another commandment, it ought to a top reason for making frequent trips to the confessional. Churches and places of worship around the world would be packed with ‘sinners’ and the religious would be droning on and on with their sermons as to why spam is ‘evil’.
But spam is evil.
I have had to deal with enough spam to make it my full-time job.
Forwarding emails indiscriminately makes your inbox a highly susceptible target of spammers as the chain of email addresses usually accumulated as inline text can be harvested by unscrupulous individuals for marketing (or rather, spamming) purposes.
Don’t want to see spam? Then think before you hit that forward button.
Additional Reading:
http://www.sophos.com/pressoffice/news/articles/2003/07/va_billgates.html
http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/blmsaol.htm
http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/nothing/microsoft-aol.asp
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