The Craftsman’s Forge

I’m sitting here at the Coffee Bean outlet in Serangoon Gardens while my recently repaired 8″ Necvox overhead LCD monitor is being refitted back in my car. What happened? Well, true to form…. Murphy’s law came into effect 7 days ago when I discovered that the LCD monitor broke down…. just barely 9 days before we travel to Genting Highlands in Malaysia. Without the LCD monitor, I suspect all hell would break loose in the car while travelling up. While I still have my Necvox in-dash LCD monitor to rely on, its still good to have another for the back passengers.

So what to do? I sent it in for repairs. Being barely 1 year old, I next discovered that the monitor is no longer under warranty. Cheesed off though I am, I’m not about to raise a ruckus over this as its important - I always maintain - to stay happy before a major holiday, lest you spoil it. Well… going up to Genting for 3 days is not what I would normally consider major, but in the light that I have not had a holiday for quite a while, it certainly is quite major to me!
Anyway….back to the present. I can’ believe that in this time and age, that Starhub is still charging for wireless connectivity! Goodness! Its a good thing Caven has a Starhub wireless account which I managed to borrow for the afternoon. If not, it would be a 200 metre hike to the nearest Macdonalds for free wireless broadband.

A big milestone on the technology front this morning. I finally got my podcast RSS feed going. This was something I had wanted to try and test out for the university, but which I had so little time for. It took me a little while to get all of it together as there seemed to be so little well written documentation on this. I suppose people regard it as so simple that documentation for this really didn’t make sense. The easy part, I would imagine is capturing the voice and/or video. This I did effortlessly through QuickTime Pro. After saving a copy of the video/audio file in your machine, export it to ipod format .mp4, etc if necessary.

In fact, the difficult part was finding out how to upload the file in a properly xml tagged RSS feed page. This I managed to do with potionfactory’s podcast maker. With podcast maker, I strung my video file together with all the necessary tags and xml file, and uploaded them all to my webpage in less than 6 minutes. If you are keen… heres the URL to go to.

Jeremy was as expected, absolutely thrilled to find out when I told him about it this morning, and he subscribed to my podcast with his itunes, sending me a screen capture as proof. Imagine the possibilities of podcasting with U21 Global! We could be shipping an ipod (with video) to every student, and have them download podcasts of lectures for access anytime they want. A picture of the itunes with my podcast below.

I think podcasting is something that gonna be big in the university’s context.

Interesting news today on Financial Times. The title reads “UK university lecturers reject planned Singapore campus over freedom fears”. It seems that Singapore’s matrimonial dance with one of its targets for a second foreign university to set up campus here is now scuttled.

Warwick University’s senate, which is made up of senior lecturers at the UK university gave a “No Vote” to setting up shop in Singapore, fearing a limit to academic freedom here. This of course came just barely 1 week after the outgoing US ambassador gave a damning speech against Singapore’s curbs on freedom of expression.

Is Singapore that restrictive in speech and freedom of expression? Well, I think alot of it lies in the minds of the people making the judegment. Supposing you were Ambassador Frank Lavin who has been used to being free to express his views wholeheartedly without reproach in the US and you find yourself in Singapore years later discovering that it has laws guarding against limits of expression, you might certainly feel that Singapore is repressive.

However, if you were a Singaporean, born of the land and its people, would you feel completely that way? I think the issue of freedom of expression has been blown way out of proportion by these people, and used in the wrong context to support their own beliefs. Do I feel repressed - having lived in Singapore for more than 30 years? An absolute and resounding NO. The reason Singapore has certain tough laws shows that it realises that every country is unique, much like every person is unique. The way the US is governed, is definitely not the way Singapore can be governed. People, culture, belief systems, etc all play a role in deciding how a country is run, and what laws are in place. Singapore grew out of very trying times, barely 65 years ago, with an independence thrusted upon us which we initially never asked for.

Since seperation with Malaysia, Singapore has had to protect its own interests knowing full well that if we did not, there would be countries all around us that would be eager to “help” govern and influence us. That is why there has always been an emphasis on a strong army, a strong social cohesion, a strong prevention of its own policies, and recently a strong demonstration of its resolve in protecting its racial tapestry by exacting the seditious law against two bloggers.

Mr Lavin and indeed the Warwick senate should seek to understand the larger picture before coming to such unreasonable conclusions. This smacks of traditional imperial notions of the “I know better than thee” syndrom held by old England and in the more recent century, the United States of America. Didn’t they study the history of Malaya, where the myopic execution of British policies without regard for local Malay culture and sensitivities made sure that the British failed in administering Peninsular Malaysia? I am sure that US histroy would also show the very same failures in their treatment of native American Indians.

So, I would clearly advise those who attempt to pick a bone with Singapore’s policies to leave us alone. We would welcome anyone to joiin us as friends, but to leave household matters to the family members. Should Warwick’s council decide not to come to Singapore, I believe there would be real regret. However, would we be seriously affected? I don’t think so. Do we need Warwick in Singapore? Well…. it wouldn’t make a difference to me really. Just don’t come to us pretending to be friends, and when you are ready to leave the country, take a stab of the very people who you counted friends during your stay here. For folks like Frank Lavin… you’re not welcome.

Just bought a domain name for meself at http://paul-chan.net. Its a pity http://paulchan.net was already taken up. Worse still, I think the owner has forgotten he owns the domain name, with the last update to the page in 2003.
Anyways, I’ve bought a package which gives me 4GB of space for US$6.95 per month. Accidentally bought 2 years instead of 1 year. Well, another way to look at it is that I won’t be bothered with payment for 2 years.
Its quite full featured, and I have the freedom to do whatever I want. I’ve already installed this blog, and I’m already doing the templates for my photo album.
If theres anyone to be blamed, I must say that I defer all responsibility to Jeremy Williams, the Director of Assessment and Pedagogy at Universitas 21 Global. It was him who got me in this Blogging and Wiki mess. No, it wasn’t enough to be playing with technology at work…. I’ve got to bring it home as well.

We woke up to news that two brash and absolutely careless young men were given a never seen before verdict of jail terms for their apparent racist remarks on their blogging websites. Apparently it all started with a forum letter from a Malay lady about dogs being allowed unleashed in taxis as she was concerned that muslims were not allowed to touch the saliva of dogs. These two boys then went on a spree of spreading callous and racists remarks on their blogs.

What terribly irresponsibility demonstrated by these two bloggers, but it is also a watershed ruling. The government has demonstrated again that they would not hesitate to prosecute those who dare bring about social dis-harmony in Singapore, even if the vehicle used is the Internet. So, bloggers need to be very aware that whatever they write could potentially get them in trouble. This would be even more concerning since I understand that our young students have taken to blogging in quite a ferocious way.

On quite a seperate note, I’ve just sent Kyla and Ariel off with their aunt for a trip out to Wheelock Place. Karen and Fabian has a gathering with some friends who are meeting at some cafe there. Interestingly enough, I was there early this morning with Kyla and Ariel after a trip to the Botanical Gardens to feed the fishes. But, sadly, the Apple Store wasn’t opened yet, so, I’m heading back there at about 5 to the Apple Store and at the same time pick up the girls.

We have an evening dinner appointment at Siwe Chin and Andrew’s place. Sigh.. its going to be a long day.

Things have somewhat developed and taken a life of its own since Oct 4th. It took me a while to figure out that apart from Konfabulator, there was a whole community of people out there who were trying to make their PCs look and act like a Mac. What did I do? Hah… I wasted no time in getting the appropriate software downloaded onto my new 15″ Compaq nx6120 laptop.

Now I have an OS X dock, dashboard, wallpaper (thats the easy one), windows, shadows, finder and everything else. To the untrained eye, my laptop would look like a Mac.

Quite unable to contain my excitement, I naturally let loose my discovery to some of the more adventurous people in the university. Little did I know that Jeremy had less than 15 minutes ago complained to Jordan about the apparent lack of a dock like the Mac, and how he piled all his application icons on his task bar ~ a poor man’s Mac.

When I burst into Jeremy’s room showing him my “Mac”, his eyes just litted up with amazement, and slowly grew into wonderment and then a pulpalble sense of “I want this thing”.
After I did my “rounds”, I sent out the links to a couple of them who were interested, and the last I heard was that Mukesh also wanted this “cool thing for my laptop”.
I think I’m gonna get into trouble with Jordan soon.

I guess after moving over to the Mac at home, I’ve just been completely bought over. Unfortunately, we’re still using Windows in the office, and its not going to go away anytime soon. So, imagine the withdrawal symptoms I’ve had to deal with on a daily basis after a night of Mac and having to face a Windows desktop for the rest of the day.

So, I had a work around. I downloaded a widget tool called Konfabulator which gives you the capability of a widget environment much like the Mac OS 10.4 Tiger Widgets.

Introduced it to a couple of guys at tthe university, and they were just completely bought over. Now I’ve started a cult following in the office.

I finally got my gmail account, after about a year since it launched. No, it wasn’t because I had difficulty getting it. In fact, I only started searching for ways to get it about 2 hours ago. Relatively simple to get one. Anyways, I now have an account, but I still have to find out how to use it as online storage from my Mac.
Will update once I have news.