idealism

Power of Assumptions

In my line of work, assumptions are the key to making logical deductions. It is the base for any analysis or forecast I work with. It is my crystal ball.

But this crystal ball has its limitation. Assumptions, being assumed, are limited in its reliability and can only be used in an all-clean situation. Furthermore, we can only assume only the truly logical, or at the most the obvious out of general consensus. Otherwise, we are only pointing in the dark.

Even the obvious out of general consensus seem rather subjective. 

A simple illustration:

When I assume that… 

most Chinese in the world eat rice

... does not mean I can deduce that…

since you are Chinese therefore you eat rice or
since you eat rice therefore you are Chinese

Sounds logical? Not really the standard of a philo class, but it demonstrates enough. (Pure logic can sound illogical to our humanly senses sometimes.)

Why don’t assumptions always work? This comes to mind the possible ignorance irregardless of how knowledgeable or informed one can be. Even if you are a walking dictionary… or even a walking encyclopedia, there will still be things we can never deduce.
So what’s all these statements about assumptions and deductions?
Sound familiar, don’t they?

Believe it or not, most of us make deductions out of mere assumptions in almost every decision we make. When we do not have definite answers, we assume. This is normal if we are an intelligent bunch.

However, what really irritates me about deducing from assumptions is that there are some who deduce accounts about others based on assumptions they make about them. When the human mind and behavior is the most irrational and less predictable, sometimes devious even, than most other living beings, we are also the creature who assumes more than animals. When most attempts to teach animals understanding of our commands by instilling the idea of assumption from a wave or a vocal command, it takes many repetition of the command before the trained animal can deduce from assuming what they think we want them to do.

Do not mistake this with our power to understand cause and effect. We wouldn’t have come this far without this intuition. It is the other tendency I speak about. The tendency to demonstrate also the power of imagination to transform the little fact known into a wild matrix of twisted assumptions. The experts for this we common know as gossipers. 

Why and how such assumptions are derived and how such stories rich of imagination come about? It seems usually compelled by the urge to draw the little short-term attention from others of the their kind… the same kind who also crave for a cheap thrill out of the little spice added to the boring fact. The cheap thrill which requires no production costs like soap opera… only the expense of others they have conveniently placed in the stories they cooked up.

So before you tell a story, be sure to warn your listeners that it is just fictional. Otherwise, avoid speaking of the assumptions you are making. You may have a strong hunch about what is going on with someone. Just keep it to yourself. There is no need to spice up the story. We always have the soap drama that we are also paying for… the same stories we vote for Academy Awards. Please do not waste the profession we have created and so expensively maintained.

Simply ‘Meow’

A conversation went like this during dinner last night:

“How do you call me, Honey kaa?” Sunsun asked when I was chewing on my beef.

“Mmmfemffmnn?” and I added a choking sound with my throat. She kept quiet. After I was done with that mouthful of beef, she asked again.

“How do you call me, Honey kaa?”

“I use my mouth… same way I chew my food.”

“No… I mean what do you call when you call me?”

“Err… is this a trick question? A telephone? A mobile phone?”

“Nooo… as in the name you call me.”

“Oh! I just call you what I’ve always called you… Meow.”

“Alaiwah? Simply ‘Meow’ lor?”

“Yes, Meow… Simply Meow.”

“No ‘sweetie’, or ‘darling’? Like I call you ‘Honey kaa’... or ‘Allen kaa’.”

“Nope. I think ‘Meow’ is uniquely you. I like calling you ‘Meow’.”

So that’s how I noticed I’ve been addressing my wife, in person and on the phone. I even pick up the phone when I know she’s the one calling, not with a ‘hello’, but with a ‘meow’. It’s no wonder that even our dog, Cobie, behaves like a cat.

Bamboo

Our new additions to the family, a couple of bamboo plants.

Art of Lazy Blogging

Step 1: Cut the “Step”... gostan

1: Blog in point form

2: Say only the necessary

3: Post pictures instead of words

4: Do not go beyond three four 4 points

Cook In On Saturday Night

“What do you feel like eating for dinner tonight?” I asked Sunsun while we were out today.

“No idea…”

“How about some pork chop?”

“Sounds good… Where are we going for that?”

“Home. I’d cook…”

And this was how I ended up…

... The Half-Naked Cook in the kitchen

I’m no chef, but I’ve some experience preparing
pork chops from my college days back in US

My own creation… the Mini-Chops
(Look! No knife required!)

Owww… Hot oil splattered into my eye…

Is there any left for me, papi? The hungry dog awaited
Stomach growls

TGIF

Again, nothing happens over the week. Just many days of working till late night (averaging to 9pm nightly) and finally ending the weekdays with more time to blog something today. Such working hours are taking a huge toil on my personal life. I have hardly any time for friends. My dog is acting like he misses me everytime I sees him (which shows how little time I’ve spent with him lately). Another indication that I’m overworked: I’ve been neglecting my iPod for the WHOLE WEEK!

I feel like my communication skill taking a turn as well. When I started a conversation in the car on our way home, I said something along the line of ”... I think I’m growing additional brain cells”. Before I could finish what I was saying, Sunsun reacted with “I don’t know how you people can work until so late… blah blah blah… ”, and her reaction went on to work culture and how people who work late regularly handle their personal life, when all I was going to say is that my brain has been working harder over the week that I feel new brain muscles growing in my skull. Am I losing something somewhere? At work, I tried explaining some findings of an analysis to my manager and she failed to understand my logical explanation. She had to interpret what I said in her own language, which is also logical but differently phrased from mine, yet I couldn’t see her point. Am I losing myself into my own world now?

Overall, I think my thoughts are getting fragmented again.

Happy Birthday, Kurt

Cobain was a happy child, always smiling, not being able to wait till the next day. But then matters were made worse when Cobain’s parent’s divorced when he was seven and by his own account Cobain said he never felt loved or secure again. He became increasingly difficult, anti-social and withdrawn after his parent’s divorce. Cobain also said that his parent’s traumatic split fueled a lot of the anguish in Nirvana’s music.

Kurt Donald Cobain (February 20, 1967 – ca. April 5, 1994) was the lead singer, songwriter, and guitarist of the Seattle grunge band Nirvana. He served not only as the band’s frontman, but as its “leader and spiritual center”. With the band’s success, Cobain became a major national and international celebrity, an uncomfortable position for someone who claimed to be “ill at ease with fame and ill-equipped to handle the responsibility that accompanies success”.

It was just sad that such an influential rock icon had to end his own life and leave his young daughter to the care of his now widowed wife. Nevertheless, he had left a legacy (both intangible and material senses) for his family, enough to take care of them through his daughter, Francis Bean’s upbringing.

Courtney and Francis Bean – 2005

So what would you say to how your family went on without you, Kurt? Francis Bean was only two when you demise yourself with the shotgun. She is now 13 years old, going through teens, a time when either one will turn up right or end up a disaster.

Courtney struggled to maintain the lifestyle you left her with and a plastic surgery frenzy that went wrong. Your fans are growing old. Your pal Dave Grohl was successful with his own band Foo Fighters but the fire is slowing dying out. What do you have remained?

I’d say your music and the flame in them are still burning. From time to time, I still hear tunes like Heart-Shaped Box and Smells Like Teen Spirit played on air. Geffen just released a Nirvana Box Set “With the Lights Out” last november. Your music is remembered today as a legend.

Now what’s there that is so hard to handle? Can’t accept the reality of a rock star? Not willing to face the media with your nuts in their throat? I must say that no matter how you have represented the rage in my younger days, but your decision to escape it all is just not what you represented. That is just not what I want to believe in. If I were you, I’d rather stay alive and shove those nuts in their arse instead.

Nevertheless, here’s a Happy Birthday to you, Kurt. You would have been a happy 39-year-old father had you stuck around, showing the ropes to your beautiful daughter and guide her to rule the world. Even if she isn’t into music, she will still show you what pride a parent can have.

Another Quiet Week

For friends who are wondering about my non-activity on this site, it has been a rather busy week at work. Yes, as usual, my excuse for MIA due to work is nothing new. Yet no, it’s not a normal week.

This week has been hectic when my second week at the new department started with news that I will be involved with the new year budgeting process this week, which I was told will be a very tedious process. That did not help much with the start of the week. To add to the already busy schedule, I was just ‘informed’ on Monday of a 2.5 days orientation workshop starting the next day on Tuesday! What the…?? I found out by accident that the agenda had already been distributed a week earlier… with my name missed out. Now try imagining the organizer panic, because that’s exactly what happened! My colleague who was supposed to share the budget work with me now had to work everything out herself. Try imagining her fury too…

I was fuming! 2.5 days of some orientation workshop which I could not miss as it will be marked as one of the most important pre-requisites for my onboarding, yet I will have to slog the next 1.5 days to make up for lost time. Clocking in at average 10 hours a day, this is definitely nothing close to the ‘Work Life Balance’ policy that the company advocate so much.

(Maybe that was only meant for the senior management… only which it will make sense.)

 
Cobie to cheer me up after my hard week at work… 

So what happened to Valentine’s Day? Nothing exciting happened actually. Just something amusing… Tuesday, if you can remember I’d mentioned, was the first day of the 2.5 days oritentation camp. By popular request, there is no dinner program arranged on that day so we can arrange for something with our partners. Before I proceed with the ‘amusing’ story, I must spoil the highlight… I had already ordered for a vase of roses last week as a surprise for Sunsun on Valentine’s Day. The amusement of the story goes about how she received the flowers.

Nothing exceptional happened during the day. We merely exchanged “Happy Valentine’s Day” wishing and a kiss in the morning. Nothing else happened over the course of the day. That’s what bothered me! The vase of roses was arranged to be delivered in the morning to our apartment after she returned home. By noon, when she called but did not express any excitement over any vase or any rose for that matter, I got impatient but kept my cool. I wanted to call up the florist about the delivery but could not find time to do so.

By late afternoon, an hour before I the orientation program ends for the day, I called her and still no news of the flowers. By this time, she admit that she’d already knew I was up to something when she found an online florist URL on IE (not sure how she did that as I remember having cleared all history). What a bummer! Firstly, she has to find out (damn the online florist for having a URL so outright obvious!) and secondly, the delivery did not happen. DOUBLE BUMMER!

What about dinner? Before you make any chivary comment, please be informed that neither Sunsun or myself would allow ourselves being trapped in the consumer-oriented valentine’s day crowd at restaurants on February 14. No matter how we might have planned and spared extra charges for advance reservation, the crowd will still spoil the whole mood. So what did we do? We ended up at my Dad’s place, as usual, to have dinner with my sister Annie.

So where’s the story? Here’s the story… Just as we were heading home after dinner, we received a call. Guess who? Correct! The florist!!!

F&#@!!!

What nice timing! Delivering Valentine’s Day bouquet at 9pm in the evening? Forget it!.. Then again. I’ve paid for it and being an online transaction, I expected a receipt in the e-mail… but there was none. So I had no way of complaining. Shouting at the Indian delivery guy won’t help. It will only work when we raise it to the management. But alas, it was late and I was tired. I have not called and no energy to call over the long working days that follow.

Just a word of caution for the guys… Do not order Valentine’s Day gifts online to a receipient in Singapore. It is fine if your beloved one receiving the gift or flowers is residing abroad, but not when she’s in Singapore. It was fine whenever I ordered something for a receipient in USA. It was fantastic even in Thailand. The bouquet I got for Sunsun two years ago was HUGE and the flowers were fresh. In Singapore? Forget it! The delivery service in Singapore still need improvement. Your place is so far my arse! How big can Singapore be??? Compare that to the size of Australia and of USA, and grade the service here again.

Now somebody tell me why the service industry here should deserve tips…

Dances of the Lights

Night fall. I set my digital cam on auto/no-flash mode. 

... and I started seeing the world in a different light…

... through the lens and the digital optical receptor…

... where colors and residue of lights in the dark of the night…

... are transformed from the sight of the ordinary road sides.

(Note: There is no photo editing done on any of these pictures taken with the digital camera.)

Candid Shots

Watch the nose twitch!

Now how big can my mouth opens… aaaaaaah~