Singaporean Defers National Service to play video games…

Published on 9/7/2005 in Gaming, Singapore, Social and Trends. View Comments Tags: , .

World Cyber Games

According to Reuters, a 20 year old Singaporean dude was granted mandatory military deferment just to compete in a video games competition… ok, it’s the BIGGEST video games competition which makes this the exception to the rule. While gaming is still a novelty for many, games with “mastery learning” applications are being developed in the entertainment industry. First Person Shooter (FPS) games such as America’s Army, Rainbow Six, or even HALO might teach you a thing or two about army tactics. For now, I have a feeling that Stanley’s going to start a new trend in National Service deferments…

A young Singaporean man has been granted a deferment from military service so he can take part in an international computer games competition, a newspaper reported Tuesday. In the first such a case in Singapore — where military service is compulsory and lasts two years — 20-year-old Stanley Aw was allowed to postpone national service by nearly two months so he could compete in the World Cyber Games.

“In line with the Government’s support for sports, culture and the arts, the Ministry of Defense will consider granting one-time deferments for pre-enlistees who are selected to represent Singapore at prestigious international sports and cultural events,” the Straits Times quoted a spokesman as saying.

The city-state — which has one of the highest Internet penetration rates in the world — wants to boost its computer-games industry and has organized a host of gaming activities and courted game developers to set up shop on the island.

About 600 people will take part in the Singapore leg of the World Cyber Games competition from Thursday to Sunday. In the finals, which will be held in Singapore in November, some 800 players from 70 countries will compete.





Washington Weekend (Part 1)

Published on 9/3/2005 in Personal. View Comments

Started off on Friday night to Washington Dulles. this morning we had a dim sum lunch at Mark’s Duck House and now we’re live at the Smithsonian museums. More to come…





New Orleans Mayor says “Get off your asses”

Published on 9/2/2005 in Media. View Comments

“I’m no drug addict man, I’m thinking clearly… what’s going on is ridiculous man!”

Hot via CNN, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin blasted the slow pace of federal and state relief efforts in a “colorfully explicit” interview with local radio station. In the mayor’s realistic view on Hurricane Katrina’s devastation, he even admitted that he was going to be in trouble for being so frank on radio about the U.S. government’s lack of quick response to their crisis, compared to events like 9/11 and the War in Iraq.

Listen to the entire “uncensored” radio interview and read the family-safe version of the transcript here.

UPDATE: The uncensored interview is now available as an MP3 via BinaryBonsai.

BTW: If you’re wondering how Hurricane Katrina got her name, the National Weather Service explains how and why.





Tomorrow.sg’s linking policy misses the point

Published on 9/2/2005 in Blogging, Singapore, Social and Trends. View Comments Tags: .

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Like a good blogger, I read both sides of a story before reflecting on my own views. I’ve read Tomorrow.sg’s new linking policy, read CowboyCaleb’s interesting post entitled “Put a sock in it“, Mr Wang’s heartfelt “Ethics for Tomorrow“, as well as links to other blogs sharing their thoughts on the issue. (Interestingly, I found that most commentaries on each post supported the respective blog owner’s stand… it kinda makes sense, however I should investigate the leanings of comments with respect to each reader’s favorite blogs)

Then, I happened to find a timely post entitled “Singapore metablog Tomorrow.sg and a discussion on Linking Policies” on Global Voices via Technorati, written by none other than MrBrown, an editor for Tomorrow.sg. In his article, he addressed the world on their views on linking policy, especially with regards to non-consentual linking (or as he calls it: not asking for permission before linking people’s blog posts). Since I felt that it was a case of an uneducated blogger making her first big mistake, I had to say something for the sake of fairness (even though I HAD to sleep 3hrs ago!).

Here is my open comment (still under moderation at time of post) to MrBrown on Global Voices

Dear MrBrown, on the grounds that if a site were publicly available on the web, we should have the “right to link”, which includes the privilege of not needing anyone’s permission to link to them. However, this recent event wasn’t a simple case of unwanted attention due to links.

I must point out that much of the Tomorrow.sg editors’ stand missed the idea of “context”. The point was that they were eventually responsible for the surge of unwanted attention to the pregnant unwed teenager. In effect, this reaction would not have reached such proportions if the catalyst were not introduced.

This event required a higher sense of ethics, not so of logic. Did none of the thirteen editors realize that it might have been detrimental to the girl’s well-being when a few decided to publish her blog?

Understandably, the better situation would have been one where she were taught the social implications of blogging, before realizing it’s full impact only after this painful mistake. Bloggers fresh off the boat would not yet have the chance to realize the various social functions of blogs, let alone understand the various web technologies at their disposal to limit their exposure to the private few. Therefore, I feel that the right thing to do would be for us, responsible & experienced bloggers, to help out new users where possible.

The blogosphere is still an evolving formless thing, so much of these rules evolve over events such as these. As such, I wish for an equally-adaptable Tomorrow.sg

Do let me know what you think!





Blogday2005: Another bloodsucking meme…

Published on 9/2/2005 in Blogging, Funny, Personal and Singapore. View Comments

Blogging can be a bloodsucking experience… take this Blogday meme for example… so silly, yet I also join in! As seen on Elia Diodati’s blog, e pur si muove (or “who moved my purse?”), it’s BlogDay today! Hooray, another reason to go blind staring at my small laptop screen! So here’s my “Theoretical” Top Five Bloggers I’m recommending for various devious reasons…

Penny in a Nutshell : An awesome cook… see her blog to believe! A Singaporean currently living in New York who works as a graphic designer, and loves fashion, cooking, and travelling. Lots of pictures of yummy things…

MisGuidedSoul : She’s an interesting Singaporean soul living somewhere far away in Buffalo, NY. Join her on her photographic adventures around the America and give her a holla so she knows she’s not that misguided!!

Naddie : I don’t know why she finds my blog interesting enough to be a regular commenter. I owe her an oversized Apple T-shirt so here’s one back to you for the mean time… you weirdo. Nadine, Singapore, young, weird, pierced, not-girly, dineitified, paranoid, loner, writer, poetess, basketballer, runner & designer.

DrunkenPanda : A fan of my blog (Hey, everyone’s entitled to one)… a blogger who documents her real life. rubez is Singapore Polytechnic student who likes music, anime, m&m’s but hates narrow-mindedness, arrogance. Whew, luckily I’m open-minded otherwise I cannot make it.

Did Mister Wang Say So? (The Blog Previously known as Commentary Singapore) : More interesting than Tomorrow.sg, more insightful than most Today columnists, I present to you The Great Mr Wang. Saviour for our people, the true citizen journalist. Read and be enlightened…





Choosing a Statistics Class

Published on 8/31/2005 in Academia, Buffalo, Personal and Productivity. View Comments Tags: .

CEP522

I’ve been busy this week taking six potential classes for as part of my program requirement, with special emphasis on the statistics classes. I’ve taken stats before, but the required qualitative class in the graduate level of the communication program went by so fast that even though I could replicate the techniques pretty decently (got an A for it), I could barely remember what everything was for. For some reason, my graduate faculty seems to rush through the required stuff, leaving it to us individuals to figure things out on our own. This can be a good thing, as it teaches us to be self-reliant, but it can also be a real test of effectiveness…

The threshold of how much to teach should at least accommodate some form of reasoning as to why we do things in a certain way. I’m pretty ok with computers, so understandably, those classes don’t need much explanation for me. But for statistics, I felt like I started off on a bad foot and really have a bad taste in my mouth at every mention of it. Fortunately for me, I’ve sampled three statistics classes for the past two days; all of them from external departments and they seem to put statistics in a better light. Still, I’m not going to kill myself over three stats classes, so I’m picking just two.

Since there’s no official guide to stats classes, here’s my raw review of selected University at Buffalo’s statistic classes (applicable to your school too). I attended these classes and looked out for the following factors:
1. Explanation of Application (the train of thought being “why use this”)
2. Syllabus Coverage (whether it gives you what you need)
3. Amount of Homework (important for busy people)
4. Methodology (mathematical techniques used)
5. Instructor’s Charisma (we’re warm humans, not cold-hearted robots)

CEP532: Intro to Statistical Research
From the Department of Counseling, School and Educational Psychology. Easy enough for anyone new to statistics… maybe too easy. I’m probably taking it to make sure my bases are covered. Recommended for stats newbies.

PSY607: Advanced Statistics (experimental stats)
From the Psychology department, Dr. Kenneth Levy seems to be prone to making mistakes on the board… he knows it and says it isn’t as important as understanding the concept, but man, it’s enough to clearly exasperate the class . Goes pretty fast… clearly advanced and requires lots of patience.

CEP522: Statistical Methods in Education I
Excellent middle ground stats class. Seems to go from a case study in journal articles to statistical explanation, making everything seem like a useful tool (assistive) rather than the start and end of everything. Prof. Jeremy Finn is very experienced and loves teaching stats, so he explains things with clarity. Includes SPSS computing classes. This is one of a two/three semester series, but it’s great as a standalone class too.

As you can tell by now, I’m going with CEP532 & CEP522.
If you’re wondering what happened to the Human Factor’s class I was planning to take… well, it’s got too much redundancy in other engineering areas and I really can’t afford the time to learn really bizarre kine metric algorithms.





Doom Movie FPS Effects: Gimmick or Revolution?

Published on 8/27/2005 in Design, Gaming, Hacks and Media. View Comments Tags: .

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You’ve probably heard of Doom sometime in your life, let alone played it many times over. With each iteration of the game (till Doom 3 which had you buying a new computer to play it), Doom has indirectly turned into a historical documentation of the technological advances in personal computing, as well as reflected the kind of expectations society sets for the gaming industry over the years.

With the introduction of the Doom: The Movie, I didn’t really hold my breath that it would be of any good since most comic book and video game screenplays aren’t usually as good as the original. Still, there was one slight difference with this new movie which was seen in the trailer… think FPS or First Player Shooter. Essentially, the Doom movie features scenes where the camera takes the perspective of the first person while wielding all kinds of weapons (including the infamous chainsaw!). It remains to be seen how effectively this will be played out, but while it works for games, it might not hold up that well on the big screen (risking motion-sickness puking from unwary audiences). While it’s easy to think of this as more of a gimmick than brilliant cinematography, it is perhaps a sign of things to come.

Ironically, in a reversal of media influence, the same effect was brought into a “sleeper hit” Xbox game title called Breakdown. In this unique Japanese game, everything is set in a realistic FPS fashion, and I mean everything! From the wielding of weapons, to donning of kelvar armor, to the consumption of rations to restore health, you would see your character’s hands realistically bringing up your item allowing you to inspect it, before opening it up to be used. If you decide to do a backflip, you’d see the world spin vertically around you as if you really did it in gym class. If someone punches you and you fall over, you’d see the floor rushing up at you. It’s that real and it make this game very distinctly different. Why not check out some gameplay video of Breakdown to see what I mean?

Ultimately, doesn’t that make you wonder how incredibly woven such intertextuality exists across multiple media? The big question is: Who’s really influencing who? If we can spot these patterns of influence, we could better predict future styles of gaming or movie productions which go well with different audiences.





Blog Traffic Report: Road closures due to heavy traffic

Published on 8/26/2005 in Blogging, Personal and Productivity. View Comments

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What a month of blogging! For the diverse range of articles I’ve published in August (especially for x86mac news & Singapore National Day), I’ve been getting more internet traffic than previously thought (no thanks to SiteMeter!).

Steve and Peter of TunedWeb.com have been very accommodating to how I’ve been sucking up a lot of their bandwidth. Just this month alone, they’ve raised the bandwidth limit on my site several times already! Yessirree, about 28,093 of you unique visitors have downloaded 6.36 GB of content from my blog in August 2005. This doesn’t include videos I’ve posted (hosted on .Mac and Internet Archives) or the other sites I run on the same server.

I’m taking two major steps to reduce bandwidth consumption:
1. Reduce the number of articles displayed on the blog from 25 to 15.
2. Allow for WordPress to compress articles (gzip) should browsers ask for them (good for some RSS newsreaders)

If you know of other WordPress options I could modify to make my blog more efficient, do tell. And no, I’m not going to take away images… I love pictures and I do whatever I can to compress them effectively.





Mac OS X + Sony Vaio = The “coolest” Powerbook ever!

Published on 8/25/2005 in Apple, Gadgets and Hacks. View Comments Tags: , .

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A few weeks after the Mac x86 project started, I’m became pretty impressed with what my friend has managed to accomplish on the Sony Vaio TR3A. Side-by-side, my 12″ Apple Powerbook looks huge and dated compared to the Vaio with its bright widescreen. Ultra-portable, running way longer (6hr battery life), cooler and faster than my real Powerbook, Mac x86 on the Vaio seems to work smoothly, with the exception of audio, wifi and the Vaio’s built-in web camera (still dealing with driver issues). Even though the Vaio is smaller, the screen resolution is at an insanely sharp 1280 by 768, which means you get the approximate desktop space of a 15″ Powerbook within Sony’s 10.6″ xBrite screen.

In some way as a Mac loyalist, I felt betrayed by Apple’s PowerPC processor marketing which long spread the belief that PPC was way faster than Intel chips. Even CrashOverride said that RISC was good; I thought CISC would soon reach a dead-end. After comparing general Finder operations and Safari rendering speeds between my 1.5Ghz Powerbook and the 1Ghz Vaio, I’m pretty blown away at the spring in the steps of the older Vaio. Looks like Intel has come a long way…

The real question now remains:
What does this mean for Apple?

While many Apple fans believe that the final Intel version of Mac OS X will have improved software/hardware protection, I won’t be surprised if the hacking community manage to crack it wide open. Will Apple be able to deal with the consequence of switching to the Intel chip? Can Apple survive as a software company as Microsoft has? From this case study, I believe a that a deeper strategy exists as to why Apple made the switch.

Conspiracy theorists in various x86 Mac forums suggest a popular belief that Apple is actually trying to discretely increase their share in the personal computing market. While Apple does make incredible hardware and software, the real seller is the holistic approach Apple takes they design a Mac. It would be exciting to see if consumers would still choose to buy an Apple-issued Macintosh over a competitive PC running Mac OS. What do you think?





Back in the academic groove

Published on 8/24/2005 in Academia and Personal. View Comments

Not winter yet but just in case

Like the rest of you, I’m starting this Fall semester with a barrage of priority-level to-dos. From today till end of this year, you’re going to witness me performing a series of academic miracles, including writing two publish-able papers (one theoretical & one quantitative) as well as my dissertation proposal, so that I can be in line for my application to candidacy by next year. This is essential since my funding will run out this year and for the next year, I hope to be just paying for 1 credit “dissertation guidance” courses just to finish my big one. As Prof. Halavais said: Think of writing dissertations as a book you’ve always wanted to write.

Fortunately, I have written quite a few papers already which I intend to update for one of my theoretical paper, so I just have to prepare a brand new quantitative paper by the end of this semester. For the quantitative paper, one of the ten ideas I’m working on revolves around investigate how opinion leadership works and where memes generally cluster in a specified realm of the blogosphere, for example opinion leadership and meme clustering as seen on Singaporean blogs. It’s still very up in the air and while it’s generally not a good idea to publish brainstorms (since they are not to be taken as absolute), I’m hoping to see if this can be a sounding board for anyone doing research on the culture of blogs.

Do share what you’re working on so we can share our research. In the mean time, here’s my reading list for blogging research (thanks Alex!)

As the last real bunch of classes I’ll officially be taking in my university before I begin my dissertation writing journey, I’m probably settling on an advanced statistical methods class in the school of psychology (on experimental stats), a usability class in the industrial design discipline and finally, my required Pro-seminar class in School of Communication (should have taken it at the start of course, but I thought I could skip it… can’t blame me for trying!).

While things are starting to heat up for me, the weather is going south as the temperature has begun to drop. Summer is almost over and soon everyone will be covered in layers of clothing, masking their identities and turning winter into a cold and faceless world once again. Gosh, what great way to start!