Thursday, March 29, 2007

OMG, how excitment!

I'm even happier that I bought the now! I just read on SMH that they're going to be a new release that have both Mario & Sonic in the same game!!! I'm so getting that when it comes out! How excitement!!

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Plan of action

Ok, have devised a plan of action on how to tackel my substandard thesis :

  1. change wordings on some resutls chapters to make it sound more, umm, rounded
  2. another sentence or 2 on justification of field sites.
  3. probably need to defend choice of research material more also seeing that co-sup have 'Googled' research that counter my arguments.
  4. add in a couple more definitions
  5. cut back on concluding sections in the result chapters (3 pages each does sound a bit much. No wonder I'm already over the word limit with a couple of sections still MIA...)
There, sounds much better. Sound be out of here in 5 or 10

Ooh, tennis tonight

Sunday, March 25, 2007

24

Finally got my WiiFitness age down to my, umm, 'real' age (well, it was real to me not so long ago). All those crunches & push-ups has really paid off. Can't wait to try out my new consolidated core on actual tennis this coming tuesday seeing that last week was rained out. Must cut back on Wii, however, because there's much work ahead with fixing my supposedly substandard thesis.

Thursday, March 22, 2007

OK, I've had time to mull over it and it's not as big a deal as I first thought. I agree on some points about the analyses (which I knew was a bit of a problem before hand that I just hadn't gotten around to fixing yet) but the criticisms on my theory & literature I can't really see his grounds. Will not totally ignore them, but not many changes. Same with the field site justifications. Just need a couple more explanations and they should be done. The only puzzling comment is the 'substandard expression'. Still no idea where is Scott pointing that at...

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Damn it! Still need to get memory cards for . How much more do I have to shell out for accessories??

Apparently I still care

I was my cousin Christins's graduation this past Tuesday so obviously when I turned up the conversation naturally drifts off to when will I get graduating. My stock answer is, of course, some time this semester. I was asked the same question last night by my town planner cousin Becks when I needed to ask her something work-related. Needless to say, stock answer. But apparently, my stock answer could very well be wrong.

Finally recevied comments from my new co-supervisor on my chapters this morning and they can only be described by 2 words - not good. I knew that there are some revisions that need to be done but had no idea (according to Scott) that I am THIS far behind. According to Scott (new co-sup), my chapters are nowhere need submitable state, for either PhD or Master (!!). The list of problems goes on & on (naive analyses, he doesn't buy my major concept, issues with fieldwork not addressed, expressions "substandard", ...). Like I said, I knew of some minor problems (eg, change some wordings so that the findings don't look so naive/one-dimensional) but not to his extent. But then again, I'm pretty sure 2 of my chosen markers would be pretty sympathetic towards my thesis, so the 'substandard' of my thesis is not as disastrous as one would think. Nonetheless, this process taught me 1 thing - that apparently I still care about the stupid PhD. I thought, after all these time, & especially since towards the end of 2nd year, I was way over this whole process of post-grad studies (& thoughts of discontinuing were never far away). Put simply, I thought I was ambivalent towards the outcome of this. But reading these negative comments, I realised that I actually still care about the outcome, and obviously not wanting to walk away (after 4 years) with (i) an outright fail, or (ii) an incomplete thesis. Many tweakings ahead. Many tweakings ahead indeed. Sigh......

Monday, March 19, 2007

Hah!

28! Suck on that Wii Fitness! Only a few more years to go then :P

Sunday, March 18, 2007

I'm not bloody 45!!!

I recently (last friday) bought a Nintendo Wii. It's EXTREMELY fun to play even though I only have 2 game discs so far. It's also my 1st venture back into video gaming in probably 18 yrs. well, I've played but not bought, let's put it that way. The old Nintendo Family Computer died a few yrs back but for some reasons still sit in our upstairs lounge. Meanwhile the old GameBoy, which also died a couple yrs back, have already been chucked. The mystery. Anywho, so, venturing in Wii land. it's a motion-sensitive game, & with the WiiSport disc that comes with the console, it's a VERY fun way of working out (well, light workout anyways). Apart from the 5 sports (tennis, baseball, bowling, golf & boxing) there is also 1 training & 1 fitness section. The fitness section, in particular, is a random selection of 3 of the 15 training sessions played in succession to test your physical fitness & then gives you a fitness age. The 1st time that I played it (saturday) i tested 45. 45!!! Unbelievable! I'm not bloody 45!!! (Oh wait, I already said that in the title) Worse still, it only allows you to test your fitness age once a day (well, once for each Mii character) so I couldn't avenge until today, which fortunately was 32. Still not my real age but much closer. I'm sure the next time I test I'd go WAY lower again. Into the teens probably, which is only just a pinch younger than my real age (oh shut up! Don't go giving me evils!)

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Another 1 bites the dust

Dang it! Just had coffee with the 2 Dans & bloody Robson is ready to submit his thesis!?!?!? He started a year after I did & his is now ready to go in & under word limit! Meanwhile I'm still unmotivated, i.e. doing it very slowly & very sporadically. Also need to cut some parts because at the moment it looks to be about 20,000 words over the 'limit' (it's more like a guideline really, but 120,000 words does sound a bit much. Maybe I should move the field site descriptions to Appendix? I don't really have an Appendix at the moment...). Anyways, really should settle & put my head down. But still, Anne is more likely to be the next to submit. Oh gawd, I'm being passed by so many others!?!?!

Saturday, March 10, 2007

Speech of the day

Went & watched Bobby today & was slightly disappointed (the 2 women who were sniggering at everything didn't help. What could have been so funny about freckly Lindsay Lohan getting her nails done??). I thought some of the storylines dragged on a bit & some were pretty pointless (the 2 youngies tripping out with Ashton Kutcher's drug den operation at the hotel for example) but it did get me back into reading speeches again (I have 2 books on speeches - the Penguin Book Of Twentieth-Century Speeches, and Speeches That Changes The World, both of which I haven yet to finish). There was only 1 RFK speech in Penguin so I had to go digging on the Internet a bit. The 1 below is the speech that was played during the ending of the movie, & the 1st few paragraphs were rather good. No Martin Luther King's 'I Have A Dream' but still good. Also, did not realise what a big year 1968 was in terms of assassinations - Warhol, King & RFK!

The Mindless Menace of Violence
Robert Francis Kennedy, City Club of Cleveland, Ohio, 5th April, 1968

This is a time of shame and sorrow. It is not a day for politics. I have saved this one opportunity, my only event of today, to speak briefly to you about the mindless menace of violence in America

It is not the concern of any one race. The victims of the violence are black and white, rich and poor, young and old, famous and unknown. They are, most important of all, human beings whom other human beings loved and needed. No one - no matter where he lives or what he does - can be certain who will suffer from some senseless act of bloodshed. And yet it goes on and on and on in this country of ours.

Why? What has violence ever accomplished? What has it ever created? No martyr's cause has ever been stilled by an assassin's bullet.

No wrongs have ever been righted by riots and civil disorders. A sniper is only a coward, not a hero; and an uncontrolled, uncontrollable mob is only the voice of madness, not the voice of reason.

Whenever any American's life is taken by another American unnecessarily - whether it is done in the name of the law or in the defiance of the law, by one man or a gang, in cold blood or in passion, in an attack of violence or in response to violence - whenever we tear at the fabric of the life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children, the whole nation is degraded.

"Among free men," said Abraham Lincoln, "there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and those who take such appeal are sure to lose their cause and pay the costs."

Yet we seemingly tolerate a rising level of violence that ignores our common humanity and our claims to civilization alike. We calmly accept newspaper reports of civilian slaughter in far-off lands. We glorify killing on movie and television screens and call it entertainment. We make it easy for men of all shades of sanity to acquire whatever weapons and ammunition they desire.

Too often we honor swagger and bluster and wielders of force; too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of others. Some Americans who preach non-violence abroad fail to practice it here at home. Some who accuse others of inciting riots have by their own conduct invited them.

Some look for scapegoats, others look for conspiracies, but this much is clear: violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleansing of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.

For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is the slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter.

This is the breaking of a man's spirit by denying him the chance to stand as a father and as a man among other men. And this too afflicts us all.

I have not come here to propose a set of specific remedies nor is there a single set. For a broad and adequate outline we know what must be done. When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies, to be met not with cooperation but with conquest; to be subjugated and mastered.

We learn, at the last, to look at our brothers as aliens, men with whom we share a city, but not a community; men bound to us in common dwelling, but not in common effort. We learn to share only a common fear, only a common desire to retreat from each other, only a common impulse to meet disagreement with force. For all this, there are no final answers.

Yet we know what we must do. It is to achieve true justice among our fellow citizens. The question is not what programs we should seek to enact. The question is whether we can find in our own midst and in our own hearts that leadership of humane purpose that will recognize the terrible truths of our existence.

We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions among men and learn to find our own advancement in the search for the advancement of others. We must admit in ourselves that our own children's future cannot be built on the misfortunes of others. We must recognize that this short life can neither be ennobled or enriched by hatred or revenge.

Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land. Of course we cannot vanquish it with a program, nor with a resolution.

But we can perhaps remember, if only for a time, that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short moment of life; that they seek, as do we, nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and in happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can.

Surely, this bond of common faith, this bond of common goal, can begin to teach us something. Surely, we can learn, at least, to look at those around us as fellow men, and surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our own hearts brothers and countrymen once again, which again stains our land and every one of our lives.

Monday, March 05, 2007

A couple of weeks ago we had 2 (dead) trees chopped down. Even now the backyard is still looking a mess, with some of the other, lower plants trampled by the loggers or flattened by the fallen trees. Those trees have been romoved now, of course, but there are still many branches lying around doing nothing (I guess that means they're lazy branches then ). Our dog has also taken a liking into sleeping in/under some of these leafy branches, & yesterday he got stuck. See link for a video of what happened. Unfortunately like most animals they freeze when they see a camera, so not much movement happening in the video. It ran away as soon as the video timed out needless to say