Thursday, May 13, 2004
Tech: No-Logic Advances
Something I am continually aware of is how I tend to pick up trends a lot later than the rest of the world. Take broadband or cable internet, for example. That I have just started using cable internet for a period of less than four months is enough to make a point. Similarly, with that program called k-a-z-a-a, my deep-seated suspicion about new technology was sufficiently strong to deter me from even finding out how it worked, let alone download it.
It seems that I am a rather old-fashioned person, for all my exhortations about embracing technology, which you now realise are all meant to be politically correct and are not things I actually mean. I experience quite an amount of difficulty trying to shake off the oft-incorrect opinion that advances in technology that bring convenience to our lives almost always come with some dark hidden price, a la Law of Conservation. I still believe that my viewpoint is true, but I have realised that my approach to the problem was rather incorrect.
In all practicality, one should embrace the newly forged tools for the convenience that they do bring to our lives, but still be cautious of any potential negative repercussions, rather than shun these tools altogether. All humans have some degree of fear of gifts from a source we do not fully understand, I suppose, but I am one of the few foolish enough to let this fear alienate me from the rest of the world.
I still prefer to find solace in the familiarity of old ways, though, and perhaps one day I shall come to regret this, but right now I cannot be bothered.
Well, back to the circumstances that inspired this melancholic reflection on the frightening speed of technological advance. I spent several hours yesterday night trying to figure out how to download files from kazaa and mirc, of which I think the latter is a great deal more complicated and must have caused me no little amount of brain cell death before I decided to minimise my losses and beat a hasty retreat. The lands of multicoloured complexity are no place for a budding adventurer in the expansive world of leeching.
Pardon me for digressing every two sentences, but I do seem rather possessed by a spasm of verbal diarrhoea today.
Ah yes, kazaa. Such simplicity in its usage, unlike mirc. I managed to find what I was seeking for, which were episode thirty-one of Fullmetal Alchemist and episode twenty-six of Fruits Basket. I have watched the former, and the latter is in the frightfully slothful midst of being downloaded. For all its convenience, I must complain about the abysmal speed on kazaa. If I had wished to download a file at three kilobytes per second I would have stuck to dialup. It is fifty dollars cheaper.
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It seems that Anime-Keep intends to stop fansubbing FMA since it has been licensed, so I hope Sonchou will continue fansubbing, that all the FMA fans out there will not be woefully deprived of this wonderful anime. It just gets more and more exciting.
Aside from downloading and watching anime, which has taken up too much of my time these days, I am reading War of the Flowers by Tad Williams. It is amusingly paradoxical how slow my reading speed is as compared to when I was reading Otherland, and I suspect it is because I read more slowly when the book is truly good. I could skip over paragraphs of technical jargon that I would not have made sense of reading a hundred times in Otherland, but here I savour every description of the land of Faerie since it is more realistic, in a way.
My favourite website at the moment has to be www.eatmejusteatme.com. I have posted a link from this site before, to the article on the rumours regarding the Gifted Education Programme. Basically, it is a blog site, with entries that I find are quite amusing for their tongue-in-cheek nature. Lots of fun.
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I am beginning to hate giving tuition. Now I realise that when the exam period rolls around, the tuition teacher is just about as stressed, if not more, as the student. It is becoming increasingly obvious that my uncle and aunt have considerable doubts about my ability, and of course no one can possibly be pleased by such a realisation, unless one intends to play a cruel prank on one's uncle and aunt and leech them of large sums of money.
Much like the patient-doctor relationship, the tuition teacher-student relationship is one where blame is most often attributed in a most unbalanced fashion, since the parents of the student seem to unerringly possess the rather insipid notion that your teaching or healing, whatever the case, should be no less than miraculous, due to the fact that they are paying you for your services. They are blinded to the reality of the situation, that what good we can do is largely limited by the innate ability of the student in the first place. As some Chinese sage (I am not too sure but I could place a bet on Confucius) once said, "Xiu3 Mu4 Bu4 Ke3 Diao1 Ye3". (Tried to type it in Chinese but it turned out as question marks on the blog.)
They do not seem to realise that there is some reason their child need tuition in the first place and that they should be happy with what improvement their child shows. But this is Singapore, unfortunately, where the paying customer will not accept such an explanation. Besides that, no sane parents accepts the fact that their child is a lot less academically inclined than they hoped, or putting in much less effort than is required.
No wonder they say the teaching profession is the one whose practitioners are subject to the greatest amount of stress. I wholly agree.
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In what ways are the new blogger layout supposed to be better than the previous one? I am afraid I am blind to those "improvements". No-logic advances, indeed.
Avaris / 5/13/2004 02:22:00 PM
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