[CM] was attending a teaching workshop as part of her med studies, and as an example, there was the question of how right is right enough.  A kid does a math problem involving several steps.  He does everything right, but then, forgets to carry a number at some point.  As a result, that number gets plugged in and filters down to a finally wrong answer.  The method was all correct though.  The question is: what score does he get?

There were a range of answers from the classroom.  It was telling, thought CM, that the vast majority of people who said that the kid should get zero were Asians.  Most of the Caucasians thought that the kid should get a 90% or an 8/10, or something in those lines, since the method was all right, and you should get points for effort.

 

I know that the “points for effort” part is the way we teach it in schools in Canada, and indeed, even when I was teaching in Korea, it’s the same case.  It’s just not nice to tell a kid “WRONG, do it again!” and leave it at that.

Yet, like CM, I remember doing problems at home, mostly with my mom, and there was no such leeway.  Things were either right or wrong and the price of a stupid mistake is a perfect zero score.  The mentality of many tiger moms, as CM pointed out, is that if you don’t get punished, you don’t have any incentive for being careful the next time around.

Just got back from judo a few hours ago. On weekends, the class is much more relaxed, because there’s no particular agenda. You just work on whatever you want with whoever you want. I was really lucky today because I got to work for a good half an hour with the instructor, and I learned quite a bit. I hope when I’m in my sixties like him I will still be kicking that much ass without a sweat.

I am having a lot of trouble performing throws from standing… It just seems like I’m not learning as fast as I’d want to. I’m doing much better on ground work though. i think its mostly that all my previous kickboxing experience is really interfering with me developing the proper reflexes for standup judo. It’s really pissing me off.

So, I’m back on vacation, sort of.  My summer class if finally over.  I pulled an all nighter the other day to finish it, handing it in at 6:35AM (due at 7AM).  Then I had a 40 minute nap.  Then suited up, and went to work 8 to 5:30 at the firm.  Almost fell asleep during the lunch office meeting.

 

But everything is okay now, on my end.  My hand (more specifically, my fingers) have healed nicely– there’s still a bit of soreness, but it seems that the sprain wasn’t as bad as I initially thought.  I’ll be trying to go to judo later tonight.

 

[CM] is having a bit of a rough patch with med school– by an unlucky draw, she’s got 4-5 major assignments in a single week.  Coupled with daily exposure to hecticness of the Emergency Department, it’s a tough lifestyle that results in her having to eat breakfasts on the walk to the bus stop.  There’s just no other time to eat.  Now that I’m done with my finals, it’ll be easier for me tohelp her with the life maintenance chores.  It’s about all I can do, really.

 

O-Week (orientation week) at the school is coming up.  It doesn’t really matter for me personally, because I’m a second year student now and there’s nothing there for me… however, there’s usually shitloads of free stuff that you can get.  Plus, I have to represent the Baduk Club and Law Society, so I’ll be there.

 

I just had lunch with [DilligentB].  The conversation at some point went to the subject of preparing people for life.

 

When I finished high school, I had already been working several part-time jobs, so it was less of a shock to me– however, the transition to ‘adulthood,’ of which a large part is being a part of the workforce, was not easy.  It still isn’t, now that I’m doing post graduate work.  The world is a tough place– and this game has real consequences.  Suddenly, you’re trust at the forefront of your own life, and you’re not being babied anymore.  Nobody is looking out for you.  Nobody will help you or volunteer to get you out of a pinch.  And at the same time, you’re forced to make decisions that affect the course of your life.

 

The main thing about becoming an adult is that suddenly, you’re forced to be the architect of your own life.  There’s only one way to live, and that’s in your own life– when you were smaller, it was okay for people to tell you how that should be.  But as you get too big for other peoples’ castles, it becomes apparent that you’ll have to start a thatched hut of your own.

And shit happens. Wolves come by and huff and puff and blow your shit down.  It’s a discouraging, frightful process– you don’t feel safe.  And when you seek help, sometimes you find that the help you get from people who you thought knew how to help isn’t that good.  Their structures, their foundations, are only marginally better than yours if any, and that shit comes crashing down as well. 

 

My question is– how do you teach someone survival skills?  How do you teach someone to be good at life?  Knowing what I know now, is there any way that I can help a young person get to where I am without them having to go through their own pains?  Watching the process can be rewarding, but it can also be heartbreaking.

And I haven’t figured everything out. I often wish that someone who is more smart, more successful, more together than me would just one day come up to me and say: “[Jinryu], I’ve been watching.  You’ve been working hard. Not let me show you the easy way, since I’ve been there.”

 

Where shall I find such a mentor?

Because my final competition law paper didn’t write itself magically while I was sleeping, much to my disappointment, I’ll have to write it myself now. I just had a low GI breakfast and some skim milk, and I’ve gotten most of the feeling back in my hand to type. Got all the computer issues sorted and even took the time to hook up the dual screen. Okay, let’s do this. It is 8:15AM and this paper has been pestering me for too long. It is time to lawyer the shit out of this paper.

… see title.

System

Given that I have a 6000 word paper due on Wednesday, I figured it was about time that I got my main workdprocessing laptop (the one with the bigger screen, as opposed to my netbook) up and running.  I kind of started reinstalling the OS on this machine a couple of weeks ago, but due to some of those usual sorts of initial problems whenever futzing around with a new distro, things weren’t working perfectly so I just put it off.

 

I finally fixed it all up this morning.  The strange problem was that somehow my var/lib/dpkg/available got corrupted, and it was making it impossible for me to acquire any new pacakages.  It was really strange.  I noticed it when I was trying to apt-get a small package (gparted) which kept on failing.  At first I didn’t think too much about it, and figured “oh, maybe there’s something wrong with the server or something.”  But then when I tried other things, like getting dropbox, or libreoffice, the problem persisted, and I started reading the error messages.  Turns out the “available” file for some very very odd reason had like 1k of garbage characters stuffed in the middle of it.  It read 00/00/00/00 etc etc for several hundred lines– just smack dab right there, for no reason. Naturally, when apt-get was trying to process things, it runs into all these garbage characters and basically threw a hissy fit.  I kind of think it’s related to a plymouth update (damn you, plymouth!) but who knows.  After I gedited the garbage out, things are now working normally.  Touch on wood.

I am now downloading a word processor as we speak, and once that’s done, it’s time to start writing this paper.

 

Judo

On a scale of 1 to 10, I incurred a 3 or 4 level injury yesterday.  1 being a laceration.  9 being something broken. 10 being … I don’t even know what a 10 would be.

While one of the brown belts, [Pan], was teaching me how to block someone’s hips with my hand, my hand was in a not so good position.  Top skip to the end of the story, I basically almost dislocated three fingers at the big knuckles.  It wasn’t his fault, and it wasn’t really my fault, it was just an accident because my hand happened to be in a really bad place (apparently).  So my three fingers got pullet backwards pretty far– my pinky was too short and didn’t get caught, thankfully.

It’s much better today, and the swelling has gone down substantially, but I can’t unscrew the cap off a bottle of milk because I don’t have enough gripping strength, or hold my electric toothbrush because the vibration is really irritating.  The throbbing pain has gone down to about 10% of what it was yesterday.

Thankfully, I have enough strength to type so I can get started on this paper.

 

Final Paper

I really enjoyed the cases that we were reading for the summer class, but I really didn’t enjoy the course itself.  For an international student, taking a 6 credit course like that costs me over 4000 dollars Australian (which is roughly equivalent to American and Canadian dollars).  There were two teachers.  In the mornings from about 9:30 until noon, the teacher would lecture– basically reading off of their notes, with little or no class discussion or any attempt whatsoever to make the ideas easier.  They were basically reading off passages of sumamries they had written for themselves, which would later be integrated into their published book.  And in the afternoons? The students would give presentation after presentation for the entire duration of 1:00PM until 5:30PM.

The fact that every week we had to come up with a 30 minute group presentation meant that we spent basically every week trying to coordinate with our classmates to cobble presentations together.  Of the reading materials, I only handled 1/6th of the total materials for the course, because preparing for my own presentation was so time consuming that I didn’t have time to read anything that the other groups would cover.  

 

The marking  criteria was really vague.  I scored a 92 on the first presentation, a 95 on the second, and an 80 on the third.  The first two presentations, I got the highest grade, but the third? I asked for feedback, and one of the professors said “you didn’t address X, Y, Z” which pissed me off– you expect me to read 30 pages of raw case transcripts and come up with exactly the point that you wanted to make on X, Y, and Z?  How about some guidance on what it is that you want?

The upcoming final paper is divided into 4 questions, each worth 25%, and each section with a maximum of 1500 words.  Question number one essentially asks the student to design the  ideal anti-trust  legal framework.  Oooooooookay.  Why bother with questions 2, 3, and 4 if they’re all going to be related to the pros and cons of anti-trust law anyway?  Why not give us a 6000 word essay on just question number 1, instead of all this other bullshit asking for various levels of focus on the same topic?

Despite that I did overal pretty well with the presentations, the professors basically wrote a book on this subject (global competition law)– so I’m reading this book from cover to cover first before saying anything.  I feel that this is one of those classes where it doesn’t matter how well I write, so much as what I write, and that annoys me.

 

Med School

I’m not a med student, but [CM] is and to be honest, its caught me off guard how much of my life is affected by it.  I was just adding up the amount of time that I spend doing things for us, like groceries, laundries, cleaning, and more recently shopping– things that normally would be done by two people, I usually take on on my own because med school owns her.  I know she’s under a lot of stress.  The hours for her are crazy and the amount of work expected of them is insane– there is no way that they could possibly learn everything that’s on the schedule in the amount of time they’re given, especially since they spend 4 days per week doing rotations in hospital departments.  But she tries, and as a result, is under a constant feeling of falling behind.

Maybe I just have too much free time on my hands.  Given that she’s in school right now and I’m at the end of summer school, maybe I’ll lower my standards when I go back to school and am also busy.  Them we can suffer and be equally oppressed by school and the lack of real quality time together, and we’ll have that in common at least.

Sometimes I just miss CM.  We don’t have time to waste the way that we used to.  Sometimes I just want to lie around in bed with her, but that’s not possible now– every minute is scheduled.  It’s impossible for me to ask for more attention from her, because I know what her schedule is like– there is no space for anything.  But as a boyfriend, aren’t I entitled to the impossible every now and then?  I keep second guessing her time management.

We have a different way of dealing with people and responsiblities though, so it’s not realistic or fair of me to judge her according to my rules.  For example, if someone repeatedly shows up late when I’m going to meet them, I tell them, very directly.  Not malliciously.  But clearly, and unambiguously.  Something like “Don’t be so fucking disrespectful– I took steps to show up early, the least you could do is not show up late” works well when in doubt.  People get unlimited continues with me, but they’re the ones who have to make the step to get back in my good books.  Until then? I manage my aggravations by disabling fucntions and services to people who let me down– because it’s a waste of my time, time that I can spend more gratifyingly doing other things.

 

I had a mentor in first semester who gave me a lot of common sense advice that I thought was quite obvious back in the day.  [Mario] had a lot of good advice.  He wasn’t so good at tutoring me as to the details of getting better grades in specific classes, but he taught me a lot about how to survive in law school.  

 

He told me, quite simply, school is a lot of work. As an international, it’ll be worse.  You’re going to have to work hard, you’re going to have to study– you’re going to have to find that here and there, you’re going to have to decline going out because you need to do readings.  You might even have to give up friends along the way so that you’ll have more time to efficiently spend on things that make you happy.  It’s a tough worldwhere you start trying to calculate how much results you get out of every choice you make in life– but it’s something you’ll need to learn how to do, because this isn’t just school, this is life, and you can’t have everything.

 

Retirement

My dad recentlly came out of retirement to work part time at a bicycle store. He’s building bikes and doing maintenance.  It’s still in the trial stages.  He and my mom are the kinds of people who can’t stand to do nothing.  They just can’t.  They must work.  Their entire lives revolve around work.  

 

My mom has over 3 months of annual vacation, which she has never fully taken as far as I can remember.  She would actually rather work than have a day off.

 

I keep telling myself that I cannot make so many choices and be forced into so many corners that one day I turn out like my parents– unable to enjoy a day off.

The problem with blogging for me is that I usually blog as a means of venting about something that’s pissing me off.  Rather than being negative as I usually am, maybe I’ll try and frame this more positively.  So yes.  Without naming anyone, lets go forward into a bright future, without (or, at least, with less) incompetence and asshatery.

 

Electronic Communications Etiquette.

Who this applies to:

If you send text messages, emails, any form of IM, or leave voicemails, then this applies to you.

 

Purpose of this:

To avoid people getting pissed off because: you don’t reply; your replies are too late; your replies are ambiguous; or, your replies don’t make sense.  Your gods/goddesses are Decisiveness and Clarity

 

 

Scenario: You get a message that a reasonable person would think is addressed to you that requires a reply.

Things that should immediately go through your mind are a number of questions.  This message that is addressed to me– does that person want a response?  Note that asking whether or not that person wants a response is different from whether or not you think you need to respond.  Something might be totally obvious to you which isn’t totally obvious to the other person.  

Signs that you need to Reply

A good way to know if someone wants a response is if there are question marks in the message.  Another way is if you see imperative conjugated sentences like “let me know” or “get back to me” or “send me xyz.”  And also, if the message is specifically addressed to you with your name in the first few words of the message.

If the message seems to be upset, that’s also a good reason to reply.

 

Acknowledge the Message

Don’t get reliant on those “message read” confirmations.  They were solely invented to bring strife and war between houses for having read messages but seemingly ignored them.  Just because you use a communication method that might send automatic read receipts does not exonerate you from the requirement to acknowledge a message.  You should probably be replying with a quick few words, unless the message you got was already a thank you or something.

Act NOW

When you get a message that seems to be requesting action, your valid options are: 

• acknowledge receipt (by writing back), and answer/fulfill the request immediately or shortly after
• acknowledge receipt, give them a progress report of what’s being done if it can’t be completed any time soon but is in progress
• acknowledge receipt, but tell them  you are  declining to do what they are asking, don’t know how to do it, etc
• acknowledge receipt, but tell them that you can only get it done in X days / weeks / pending some Y, so you will get back to them

Note that in none of the above options is there a single option to ignore a message requesting action.  Given that we all have cellphones, even if not smartphones, and we all have computers, there’s no reason why a reply should come later than a business day or two.

 

The WRONG things to do

• Just because you think that SMS was sent to a few other people inviting people to drinks, you feel that it was a mass message that you don’t really need to reply to because you can just hide in the background.  IT ONLY TAKES A FEW SECONDS to decline involvement, and it keeps organisers in the loops.  It also makes organisers develop the impression that you’re a responsible, communicative adult rather than a teenage shitface who has commitment issues.
• Do not make assumptions that someone has already been informed of the answer to something they have  asked you.  It takes a few seconds for you to ask something like “I think Maria has taken care of this already.  Is it alright now?”
• Do NOT ignore a message just because you don’t know the answer.

Alternatives and Referrals

• When someone messages you and you can’t oblige, help them: give them alternative dates to meet up.  Maybe refer them to someone else who might know.

Stop Taking Shortcuts

 

• This isn’t SouthEast asia– don’t start doing like they do in the Phillipines are abbreviating four letter words to three letters.   Don’t start substituting question marks with periods or commas.  If you have a question, put a question mark at the end of it.
• GRAMMAR.  Use proper fucking grammar!!  Spelling can be forgiven, but grammar is what gives meaning to your message.
• Take the time to use proper punctuation.  The milliseconds you save by not punctuating properly come back to bite everyone when your message is misinterpreted, or un-interpretable.

Be Decisive and be Clear

• Do NOT be passive agressive in messages.  Without your weasel face for people to look at, people won’t know whether you are really suggesting X or Y because your writing doesn’t convey things as clearly as you think.
• Don’t be afraid to say YES or NO (or conceptual equivalents).  When you are replying to a message, you are making a decision– don’t try to sugar coat things.  Stand behind your decisions and stop trying to soften the blow with ambiguity.

Set Deadlines

• Give people time frames when things are going to happen.  Set deadlines for YOU and OTHERS.

 

Bottleneck your Communications, but Check that Bottleneck

Don’t hold yourself to be contactable by WhatsApp, kik, Kaokao, AIM, Skype, Gtalk, email, facebook, hotmail and yahoo all at once if you can’t.

 

 

Example: “This week is a bit busy for me, I’ve got to do a lot of XYZ.”

Does this mean yes or no?  The person could be meaning to say “I’m busy this week, but I can make space for you! Let’s do it at X” Or on the contrary, they could mean “I’m busy this week– I cannot help you.”  Remember the golden rule– decisveness and clarity.  You need to make a choice, and equally important, you need to convey that choice clearly to the other person.  Here, both elements are lacking.  No one sends you a text message asking your for X and secretly wanting to hear your life story– be a doer, a solution maker, and a helpful person– and establish decisively and clearly whether you are useful or not.  For bonus, give them solutions them further options.

 

 

Being in Sydney, Australia, I use a VoIP account in Montreal, Canada, to call family.  I’ve basically got the account details plugged into my smartphone (an HTC Desire HD), and I can toggle outbound calls between using my SIM card’s local account, or over the internet by the VoIP account.

Here at work, us underlings aren’t allowed to use the company WiFi.  Well, more specifically, we’re not given the passkey to use it, so even if wanted to abuse the rule about not using WiFi, we can’t really.  However, nobody told me that I couldn’t use “Internet Passthrough” mode on my phone to physically hook my phone to the computer and get internet through a cable, so that’s what I do.

 

This morning, I had to talk to my folks back home about something, so I tried dialing home.  The phone rejected me, saying that it could only do VoIP calls if I had WiFi connectivity.  Which is kind of dumb. I think the reason why they have this restriction is because they don’t want call quality going to hell when you’re trying to do it over a normal 2G or 3G data link– but technically speaking, shouldn’t a direct cable internet passthrough be more than enough for me to use VoIP?

 

I guess the software makers just figured that if it’s not WiFi, you’re probably using over-the-air data, and that wouldn’t be fast enough.  Ironically, internet passthrough cable hookups I guess are such an old school method of internet connectivity  that I suppose it got overlooked for VoIP usage, even though it should be the fattest and fastest pipe possible.

 

 

In other news, yesterday night, I went for bonus points and installed Pepperminst OS (3), 32-bit version– everything worked out of the box.  Considering that it is very closely related to Linux Mint, I don’t see why LM14 64-bit broke or removed good things from the older 32-bit versions….

Wow, what a flop.

 

It does seem that LM14 runs faster than my old distro, which was LM10.  But it could also have to do with the fact that my LM10 had so many broken dependencies that I couldn’t I haven’t updated any of the software for a couple of years now.

 

However, on reboot, everything about it fell apart.  I’m not sure I think it’s such a big deal that Gnome has been replaced with Mate / Cinnamon– doesn’t make that much difference to me.  Under the hood though, they’ve removed some of the tools that I thought were quite good, and they haven’t really dealt with issues that have been there since LM8.  The bootup splash screen still has screen resolution problems that are a bit tricky to resolve (I can’t remember how I fixed this in my previous OS).  But, most annoyingly, the 64 bit version of LM10 doesn’t work with my wifi adapter out of the box.  That’s really sad.  All previous versions of LM that I’ve used, that is to say, 8, 9 and 10, all were able to figure out my wifi card all on their own– this time around, not only isn’t it figuring it out, but installing the correct packages isn’t resolving the issue.

 

Strangely enough, from reading the forums, it seems that my particular broadcomm wifi card problem only exists in the 64-bit distro– not in the 32 bit.  What a hassle.

On the plus side, I figured out the partitions properly, so all my data is backed up on an untouchable partition.  I can now just reinstall a 32-bit version of LM10… otherwise, I was thinking of perhaps using Peppermint OS.  We’ll see when I have more time.

This morning, [CM] and I are up early because she has some homework to finish in the morning before she can head out to the hospital to shadow in the Emergency Department.

 

I’m taking this time to procrastinate from writing my final paper for my summer class by doing a bit of electronic housekeeping.  Well, it’s more like renovations, because I’m not just talking about taking care of email backlog– I’m reinstalling my OS.

The current laptop I’m using has quite the history to it.  I bought it in South Korea from Yongsan with [Zanshin], so it’s a korean machine in some respects.  Even has the korean keyboard.  So this machine is now over 7 years old.  It’s still trucking like a real trooper though, and I have Linux to thank for that– this hardware would be pretty crippled by modern Windows requirements.

I’m currently installing Linux Mint 14.

 

There are a few changes to the way I’m doign things this time around, which are probably more technical than the average person cares, so if you’re not into this kind of stuff you might as well skip the rest of this post.

• I’ve got multiple partitions on this laptop’s 250GB hard disk.  Mostly that’s because whenever I installed a new operating system, I chose to install it “alongside” the old one rather than just wiping the whole thing clear.  As a result– I’ve actually got an install of two older versions of Mint and one of Ubuntu!  Yes, it’s rather sloppy, and  waste of hard disk space– what I really should have done in the first place is made a separate partition for /home, because all I really wanted was for my docs to persist.  However, when I first starting Linux with this laptop, I didn’t know what /home meant, much less how in the hell to understand the installation procedure beyond any of the defaults.  So one of the big changes this time around will be that I’ll have just three mounts– one for “/”, one for “/home” and one for swap.  Once I get things set up, I’ll copy the contents of the old installs’ /homes (which are not separate partitions, they’re all on the same partition as the old / installs) and then merge them all into the single separate partition.  Then, if things are working out, I’ll erase the old installs’ partitions and reclaim the otherwise stagnant space.
• I intend this install to be much more secure than previous ones.  Not that I’m guarding top secret information or anything, but I just like the idea of getting better at this stuff in general.  I’d like to start playing around more with port forwarding and stricter firewall rules in general.  Encrypting my data is also a priority.  I’d like to build some proxy browsing protocols into the default settings (although I imagine that could get annoying for some location based services, so we’ll see how that goes).  Finally, this is a longer term goal if I can get the help of my flatmates, but I’d like to use MAC address filtering on the router (although that doesn’t directly involve my laptop much).
• I’d like the theme of the new setup to be persistence across devices.  That means that I need to find better ways of syncing things– bookmarks, files, etc– across my smaller netbook and my phone.  Yeah, there’s a lot of cloud software to do that kind of thing, but I haven’t really decided on just how to go about it yet.

Hmm… looks like the install process is done. Time to reboot and see whether or not everything has exploded.