July 2008
41 posts
“It turns out that the seller provided the $125,000 down payment, and also...”
– Calculated Risk: Fraud in the 2008 Mortgage Vintage
WatchTell me about the chord progressions, all ye music students. This does remind me of Rob Costlow though.
I am annoyed beyond words. I might streak a piece of paper with something, or just shred it.
Rawr.
“Widely regarded as more difficult than the A levels, students have to take six...”
– Raffles JC may offer IB diploma by 2010
People ought to be informed of Occam’s razor when doing mathematical modeling. I’ve seen people submit the most ridiculous parameters on ordinary functions, even when it’s from regression. For sanity’s sake they should be taught how to use it properly.
They could start with pushing the other functions in that same menu.
Jane
I won’t spoil it for you, but it’s mostly worth your 2 hours, as usual.
Continuing on smartness
I didn’t mean that he’s gonna have to learn programming himself, guidance is awesome to have, but the really good programmers out there are mostly self taught, people who were able to absorb knowledge wherever it came from, be it a peer, a book or an actual teacher. The ones who were “taught” programming are code monkeys with a very limited ability of actual programming,...
chiangfong: it doesn't matter
chiangfong: they have talent
chiangfong: i'm smart
chiangfong: it's alright....
CNA
I was just drilling into some stuff about Cisco certifications, and here’s a bit of trivia about the secondary schools in Singapore that are Cisco Network Academies:
Beatty Secondary
Dunman Secondary
Fairfield Methodist Secondary
Ping Yi Secondary
Raffles Institution
Singapore American School
St Francis Methodist
Other tertiary institutions include NYP, NP, TP, SP, TP, NTU,...
“Two wrongs don’t make a right, dude. Two wrights made an airplane!”
– Snaller
Pain
I stand up and my head starts pounding. Bloody headache.. even the paracetamol couldn’t send it packing.
Curiously, I had two tension headaches on consecutive Mondays a few weeks back.. Monday blues eh. Then now it’s a localised one (migraine?) on a Friday.
WatchThis isn’t really stop-motion photography.. I really have no idea what to call this. But it’s a really cool concept. It won’t take long, exactly one minute.
{fray} drugs - the scar →
Quite a nice illustrated story. It’s like a graphic novel, except online. Take a look.
Our Electric Future →
givemesomethingtoread:
Energy independence is the wrong goal. Here is a plan Americans can stick to.
Insightful.
The plastic buttons we push
superamit:
I earn my living—the food I eat, the apartment I sleep in, the books I read, etc. — by pushing plastic buttons all day long.
It’s the same with most of my friends.
I push a lot of buttons. There’s a trick to pushing them in the proper order, but no one way is “right” and everyone pushes their buttons differently. In fact, the order in which they push their buttons (combined with the...
Green hills
Today was a wonderful day, with cloudless, blue skies.
I have been dreaming recently, of haptics and glass. One connects, the other separates.
And during the day, I built magnificent castles in my head, wondering about how I am to marshal the world to build them on the rolling hills of this land.
Maybe it can be done. But is it wrong to dream so much, and so grandly? Am I asking too much?
“Essentially all desktop stuff is crap compared to well designed embedded...”
– The Very Worst Uses of Windows (/. comment by Hal_Porter explains the difference between embedded and desktop OSes)
Flexible modular scheduling →
I wonder how long until someone decides classes shall be 38 and 58 minutes long, allowing 2 minutes for teachers and students to pack, teleport, and unpack between classrooms. Rollerskating simply doesn’t cut it anymore.
“I can teach a smart person how to write better code, but I can’t teach...”
– How To Show Code Samples? (/. comment by Keeper)
Zander
Benjamin Zander, conductor of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra. Wow. I watched this TED talk couple of weeks back and jaw nearly met floor.
Garr Reynolds posted about him last year (Ben Zander on performance and transformation), but I didn’t take much notice.. then he just popped up again: Benjamin Zander: Who are we being? Really, wow.
I intend to watch his presentation...
/////
While on the bus just ow, I saw someone with a scar on his wrist along the forearm.
There wasn’t pity, just sympathy and a twinge of sadness.
Hairy Moment
R: we should all shave bald, like Sham!
J: Shave for Sham!
D: what a sham..
And in other news, the administration has approved Hair for Hope.
iPlayer "has tripled ISP's bandwidth costs" →
Cool. How long until Singapore ISPs stop raising downstream caps and start charging based on data transfer, à la HSDPA plans?
Renesys Blog: Cogent Becomes Transit-Free →
Cool.
“The creation accounts were the attempts to describe within the language of human...”
The Central
Located conveniently above Clarke Quay MRT, but an absolute maze inside. Escalators are hidden in the weirdest places and the basement is.. ugh. A mess is understating it.
Pasta de Waraku has a tiny shopfront, tiny kitchen, decent seating that looks out at the river (and the G-Max rides), and nice food. Don’t go if you’re looking for a selection of pasta with tomato-based sauces,...
“There’s no law against wearing full-sized headphones out in public...”
– Review: Sennheiser PX 100, PX 200 and PXC 250 portable headphones
Prepaid
$10 stretched to three months of light usage. There’s no way any postpaid plan is going to beat that. Work expands to fill the time available; usage increases to utilise the quota available.
Maybe the old pod lite plan would have come close. It vanished.