Old Wisdom, Bad Wisdom: Play Hard to Get

Written on Sun, 12 June 2016

We have heard the old adage told by older women to young ladies, play hard to get to protect yourself.

It certainly has its merits:

• You want to be sure that man really wants you
• You want to be wanted
• You make sure those who are short-termed interested are filtered out

It does make sense in this light. Yet have we also considered the consequences?

Play hard to get, and you will be treated like a trophy when you are gotten.

I'm not sure about you, but I'm pretty sure most ladies still want to be loved even after marriage. No wife would want to be a decorative ornament in a big grand home.

Playing hard sends a very wrong message, that relationship is a game, and you're the prize. You're not a walking badge beside him, a trophy in the kitchen, a status for him to brag.

Does the old wisdom still hold its place in our modern culture? I believe it does, but with much less importance. Ladies should consider that love works both ways. While ladies seek to be loved, men seek to be respected. Ladies, do what you need to know that your man loves you, and respect him as your man, your husband, you lover, your companion for life.

However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband. - Ephesians 5:33

The Kindness Chain

Written on Mon, 30 May 2016

Has someone just given you an act of kindness? Thank that person. That person might have just received kindness from someone else, and thus has passed the kindness baton onto you.

The kindness baton is now with you. What will you do?

Pass it on?

Keep it for yourself?

Questions! Questions! Is there even a need for questions? The power to change lies in you. Pass on, make a better world. Keep it, the world just gotten a little dull.

Pass on that baton to another person. When the other person thanks you for it, say this: "Do the same kindness to another person". Let the other person decide whether to pass the baton or not. You have done your part of complete the kindness chain.

Finally! Categories

Written on Thu, 19 May 2016

Ok, so I have finally added categories into my blog so that I can properly categorised my blog post. More than just administrative, it's so that I can put up the menu up there and have you sort out the post. Plus, I like things organised. And if I'm going to get any advertising agencies for my site to earn a tiny income from here, I need to have proper site maps.

There's still a lot of things I want to work on for my little site. The most painful eye-sore is the site design. I really should start working on it. But then again, it's not my highest priority right now.

I'm considering a tick-tock improvement cycle for my site, somewhat similar to how Intel implements their tick-tock model, shifting from working on shrinking their transistors to working on a better microarchitecture, and back again. So I'm going to implement something like that, shifting from implementing site improvements on existing items, to implementing something new on my site, which I will share how I did that new thing to the world.

Interestingly, Intel is not going to use that tick-tock model anymore, instead, opting for "process-architecture-optimization" cycle. Moore's law is in trouble.

Right, so on to what I'm going to work on next. Maybe https for my site?

Improving my little site

Written on Thu, 12 May 2016

Ok, so I've been spending the past few days trying to improve the site at the back. This is very important as the content that is generated on the front depends a lot on what was at the back. The system behind the blog posts were not correctly rendering <br /> properly. So I had to dig deeper to find out why my /n is not properly converted.

Turns out, the way the wiki text parser is treats every line break as a new line to parse, thus totally ignoring my regex that needs to read the /n symbol. Thus I had to do hackish methods make line breaks work.

It works out now properly.
Like!
This!
Tada!

And the previous posts are now rendering line breaks properly too.

The best teachers

Written on Wed, 4 May 2016

Today I came across a very nice quote:

The best teachers are those who show you where to look, but don't tell you what to see.

- Alexandra K. Trenfor

Now, how true that. When you are learning about technology, there always this strange catch at the back of your head: When will this piece of knowledge go outdated?

Technology moves at an incredible pace. What you learn today will eventually become obselete in a couple of years. In some cases, months.

As a teacher myself, I never provide my students answers to the questions they have. Only pointing them at the right directions for them to seek the answer. In some cases, I ended up learning along side with them.

You see, the skill of acquiring knowledge is more important than the knowledge itself. Knowledge is an object; you can get it, you can lose it. But the skill to acquire knowledge stays with you till the end.

When it comes to technology, such a skill is arguably the most important skill of all. It is the skill that allows you to stay relevant in the midst of a fast changing environment.