• All Hail the Stand-Up Meeting! | Freakonomics
  This NEEDS to become a part of Singaporean culture.

• Meet the Marriage Killer | The Wall Street Journal
  “While the word itself can provoke chuckles and eye-rolling, the dynamic can potentially be as dangerous to a marriage as adultery or bad finances. Experts say [nagging] is exactly the type of toxic communication that can eventually sink a relationship”.

• Willpower Part III: How to Strengthen Your Willpower and 20 Ways to Conserve It | The Art of Manliness
  Skip the introduction and head straight to the ’20 ways’ list.

• “Center of the Universe” by Simon Rich | The New Yorker
  “On the third day, God’s girlfriend came over and said that He’d been acting distant lately.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ God said. ‘Things have been crazy this week at work.’

  He smiled at her, but she did not smile back. And God saw that it was not good”.

• With a Little Less Parental Support and Encouragement, I Could Have Been Somebody | Thought Catalog
  “If I had the opportunity to relive my ‘tween’ and teen years, I would exhibit a such a level of insubordinate and rebellious behavior that my parents would have no other choice but to knock me around and issue insults and threats that, with any luck, would provide me with the deep emotional scarring needed to produce multiple works of true literary merit”.

Janet picks up her fortune cookie,
Then puts it down, turns to her friend:
“Don’t bank too much on youth. Your rookie
Season is drawing to an end.
John, things we would – when young – not think of,
Start to make sense when, on the brink of
Thirtydom, we pause to scan
What salves and salads cannot ban,
The earliest furrows on our faces,
The loneliness within our souls,
Our febrile clawing for mean goals,
Our programmed cockfights and rat races,
Our dreary dignity, false pride,
And hearts stored in formaldehyde.

– Vikram Seth, The Golden Gate

No worries – no anxiety. Just reading a very good book and felt those were awesome lines.

This boat faithfully trawls the canal between SAJC and SAS to pick up litter and leaves on a regular basis (every week or so, I estimate).

Based on this, I’ve had some students who’ve suggested using this waterway as a transport route as part of their Project Work [1].

If students can do it, what more adults?

That’s why I think it’s possible for our urban planners to come up with more creative solutions to solve our transport woes instead of just razing buildings and fattening roads [2].

Links

[1] Project Work
[2] razing buildings and fattening roads

• “I Love You, You Smell Nice” | ELLE
  “When we say, poleaxed, ‘What’s that perfume? I really like it,’ here’s what we mean: Stealing a kiss in a cab, drinking a Manhattan, which I have never drank before, in Manhattan, where I have never been before tonight”.
   
• Found Someone’s CD Collection On The Sidewalk | Thought Catalogue
  “I’m a child of the 90s. I remember what it meant to build a CD collection: spending hours at Sam Goody or FYE or Tower or some other vaguely intimidating mall record store buying albums one at a time for $16 a pop, reading the back of the jewel case for 10 minutes, trying to decide if the band’s other nine songs were as good as the one you heard on the radio, knowing they probably weren’t, and buying it anyway”.
   
• Navigating Love and Autism | The New York Times
  For all my autistic friends.
   
• Let Simon Decide
  Let Simon Decide is a decision-making site that gives advice to help you decide what option you should choose, in the event you should ever find yourself in a dilemma.
   
• How to Get and Stay Married | TIME Ideas
  1. Know that the grass ain’t greener
  2. Fight fair!
  3. Be good, giving and game
  4. Never stop flirting
  5. Find mentors

  – I’ve never been married, but I’d say this advice works, even for couples in long-term relationships.

Helping a friend plug this.

The Butter Factory is producing a short film titled The Bouncer and we need extras for club scenes.

Filming will be at The Butter Factory itself from 6pm to 11pm on:

• Sun, 15 Jan 2012,
• Mon, 16 Jan 2012, and
• Tue, 17 Jan 2012.

If you’re interested, please e-mail Lynn at pinkstarfishey@laremy.sg or text her at 9683 5120 with:

• Your name,
• Your contact number, and
• The date(s) you can make it for filming.

PLEASE:

• Like partying (all ages welcome)!
• Come dressed to party like it’s NYE!
• Be trustworthy – we’re on a tight schedule; we can’t afford no-shows so we need those who RSVP to turn up.
• Bring an extra set of party clothes as we’ll be doing multiple shots.
• Bring an extra pair of shoes – comfortable ones so you can wear them in between takes
• Have dinner before you come (there’ll be a bar on set).

PLEASE DO NOT:

• DO NOT wear white (all other colours are fine).

Some perks to thank you for your time:

• Each extra will get a ticket for one free entry into Butter Factory at a later date.
• We’re trying our best to provide some free drinks/snacks! This will be confirmed.
• We promise an absolutely fabulously fun time with the cast and crew!

So! I was quoted in an article in today’s Straits Times.

This is a snippet from the article, including my quote:

Education Minister Heng Swee Keat was a guest at the Pre-University Seminar last June but chose to sit unnoticed at the back of a hall for more than an hour, to listen to students’ presentations.

He said he prefers not to disrupt proceedings or affect the candour of discussions.

He also stressed that it is his belief in working together with educators at the front line and with the community that “shapes my interaction, rather than a reaction after the [General Election]“.

Mr Heng also does not believe in making unannounced visits to schools to try and catch educators out.

That is not helpful in generating trust between educators and those at the ministry’s headquarters, and trust is what matters in the long run, he said.

Project manager and parent of two, Mr Tan Gin Tat, 40, gave a thumbs up to Mr Heng’s school visits.

However, he added: “If Mr Heng is walking down the school corridors, I hope he doesn’t just talk to the top people but chats with teachers on the problems they are facing on imparting knowledge to kids.”

Teacher Laremy Lee, 28, however, wants more unannounced visits to be made. Schools and teachers sometimes “stage a show” for office-holders on planned visits, he said.

– Andrea Ong and Cai Haoxiang, Do-it-yourself ministers gaining notice, The Straits Times, 3 Jan 2012, p. A8 (my emphasis).

I realise that I may sound as though I want Heng Swee Keat to catch educators out, so I thought I’d share the actual quote I gave in its entirety:

Question: Heng Swee Keat has been making it a point to visit schools of all levels and strengths to find out more about what’s going on the ground and to gauge the prevalence of parents’ feedback. A few of these visits were unannounced. How do you feel about this move by Mr Heng? Are you in favour of it or do you feel it’s just “wayang”?

Answer: Unfortunately, I don’t have a bird’s eye view of things, so it’d be difficult for me to correlate the visits with efforts such as the recent Character and Citizenship Education initiative. If the visits have led to the understanding that parents are as responsible as teachers for instilling values in the youth of today, for example, then yes, I am in favour of more visits like these.

With specific regard to unannounced visits, I think it’s great. When announced visits are made, what happens is that schools and teachers will stage a show for the visiting office-holders. So office-holders end up going off with the impression that everything is fine and dandy, when in actual fact, there are many problems that have been swept under the carpet, only to resurface after the visiting office-holders leave. So there should be more unannounced visits.

The point I was trying to make was that there should be more unannounced visits so that office-holders get a good sense of the realities of the situation as opposed to an artificial view of what is going on.

• Sometimes, it’s Not You, or the Math | The New York Times
  Word.
• Life and Letters: The U.S. Postal Service Ends Next-Day Delivery | The New Yorker
  I have mixed feelings about the demise of snail mail – like the future of printed material, I’m still trying to understand my own stand on the matter.
• Their Noonday Demons, and Ours | The New York Times
  “[Procrastination] probably strikes you as an extremely, even a uniquely, modern problem. Pick up an early medieval monastic text, however, and you will find extensive discussion of all the symptoms listed above, as well as a diagnosis”.

  More about procrastination – a topic which I am quite interested in – here and here.

• Parenting in Singapore | LIFT: Limpeh is Foreign Talent
  “Ironically, one thing she never ‘banned’ from the kitchen was alcohol – there was always some alcohol around and at family gatherings and parties, alcohol would be served. I was exposed to alcohol at an early age and the fascination soon wore off when I realized how bitter it was. But most of all, it was PERMITTED. It was not FORBIDDEN. … That’s why I don’t even bother drinking today”.
• Welcome to the Age of Overparenting | Boston Magazine
  “In my nine years as a parent, I’ve followed the rules, protocols, and cultural cues that have promised to churn out well-rounded, happy, successful children. I’ve psychoanalyzed my kids’ behavior, supervised an avalanche of activities, and photo-documented their day-to-day existence as if I were a wildlife photographer on the Serengeti. … But lately, I’ve begun to wonder if, by becoming so attuned to their every need and so controlling of their every move, I’ve somehow played a small part in changing the very nature of their childhood”.

I’m hoping the writing will tire me out enough for me to sleep, and also because I thought I’d share what’s on my mind – which is, coincidentally, the same thing that’s preventing me from sleeping.

–

Since my last prophetic success (LOL), I’d like to make a few more social media predictions (which aren’t so far removed from my own technological wish-list, actually):

1. Tit for Tat:
   A Facebook app that goes through your friend list, discovers what privacy settings people use on you and apply those same settings back on them.

   Sounds like childish pettiness, I know, but look at it his way: we’ve reached an age in which information can be valued – or priced.

   Hence, if Entity A has more information about Entity B than the converse, Entity A has greater leverage and Entity B stands to lose out.

   Now, answer me truthfully: would you rather be Entity A or Entity B?

   Precisely.

   And knowing how some of our information on Facebook has the potential to make or break us, it’s only fair for information to be shared in as fair a manner as possible.

   I’m as sure as hell not going to trawl through my Friend list to figure out privacy settings for each individual ‘Friend’, so an automated process to do this would be nice.

2. Mute function and Timeline for Twitter web client:
   These are actually quite low-level ideas, but I think they’d really make Twitter better to use in the long run.
   • When I’m using my Mac at home, I have Tweetdeck which works great in terms of muting stupid people who tweet about inane things.

     However, I don’t always use a Twitter app that has this function which means there’s a lot of noise I have no way of filtering out.

     I’d unfollow these people, but I think it’s rude, so I’d rather just mute them – similar principle to that of Tit-for-Tat, I guess.

   • Twitter needs a timeline in the same way Facebook has one, just so we can re-discover all our ‘old-but-gold’ posts and marvel at how intelligent (or alternatively, how juvenile) we used to be.

     Until we started working and turned into our parents.

3. Google Tunes:
   This is different from Google Music in that it works like a normal Google search.

   Instead of a textual input, however, you SING or hum a tune to your computer or Siri or what have you.

   The Google Tune search then scours its ginormous database to find the name of the song you’ve just hummed, thereby saving you many sleepless nights of having an earworm run through your head endlessly.

   This is especially helpful when you can’t Google the lyrics because you don’t, for the life of you, know what the lyrics are – but you know the tune to the chorus very, very, very well.

   Tragicomedy aside, it’s possibly the highest-level idea of the lot, because it’s very close to the concept of what Web 3.0 is envisioned to be like.

Let me know when these things come about, or better yet – if similar products already exist.

Still somewhat upset at the irregular regularity at which items in my own apartment go missing…

Nevertheless, I’m not going to let that spoil my day. Because today, I am bond free!

Technically, though, but still – it’s good to be free! *makes whale sounds*