February 2006

There were 6 posts published in February 2006 (this is page 1 of 1).

Of Business Schools

I’m not exactly sure what to feel about Business Schools in general, but most would conjure images of happy, carefree, 3-day study week students hanging out at movie theatres when their engineering counterparts are slogging away in school. Students who have had enough of Science-based education, ‘A’ level graduates who are absolutely clueless on what to do in university and the gullibles who are sold on a course with hunks and babes all jump on the business bandwagon. All is good and well, but what exactly is the focus of business schools?

Being the time of the year again, universities are once again aggressively promoting themselves to prospective undergrads with full page advertisements, MRT posters and what not. Notably, NUS Business School (NUSBS) has been particularly aggressive this year, putting up full page advertisements with arbitrary charts and figures in an attempt to downplay their competitors. I saw an advertisement by NUSBS on Today that showcased what was probably their finest graduates; a Manager at KPMG, a Wealth Management Associate at Citigroup, a Product Manager at Maybank, a System Analyst at Prudential and a Research Analyst at Euromonitor International. SMU, for another instance, takes pride in that all their graduates land themselves a job within 6 months, with more half securing one before graduation (TODAY, February 17 2005). Sure, many of them work for big MNCs and probably draw a large paycheck, but is that all that is to business education?

“In America, if you work for a large company for a long time, people ask why. In Singapore, if people leave a large company, people ask why. This is a huge difference.” – Guy Kawasaki

To be fair to these schools, there are evidently a handful of enterprising students out there that had ventured out of their comfort zone and challenged the traditional notion of a successful career – the white-collar worker that works from 9 to 5, draws a handsome paycheck and drives a company car. Unfortunately, few must have been able to make it big enough to be recognised and mentioned by their alma maters in their recruitment efforts to attract prospective business students.

“As I look out before me today, I don’t see a thousand hopes for a bright tomorrow. I don’t see a thousand future leaders in a thousand industries. I see a thousand losers. What can you expect? Loser. Loserhood. Loser cum laude.” – Alleged commencement address given by Larry Ellison to Yale’s Class of 2000 Full Transcript

Business schools need to rethink and reinvent themselves. Are they proud of merely churning out first-class honours graduates that will eventually have their paychecks signed by former classmates that have dropped out of university? Are they doing enough to encourage entrepreneurial activities within their students or are they satisfied with featuring their graduates in stable white-collar jobs? Should our efforts in promoting entrepreneurship stop at a superficial level of business plan competitions? Granted, while the idea of the inculcating entrepreneurship in Singaporeans might sound as quixotic as running campaigns for courteous driving, the current climate of business school is aggravating and perpetuating the very problem that it ought to solve.

Should We Bring Him Up As A Buddhist?

Jeremy wrote:

Forget about religion and never bring that up at all. Instead, bring him up #1 to be honest and #2 to be questioning. If you teach your child these 2 qualities then you are equipping your child with the 2 greatest tools in life so that he, in his own strength, can find his own truth in life.

WARNING: Fans of boring web interfaces (like mine), the above site contains an obscene amount of colours and even an attempt to put music on the site. But the content of the above post is good.

p.s. Jeremy you should really fix your blog entry links. It’s tough to find the link to your entry.

30 Years of Computing and My Ho-hum Life With It

Chanced upon this article, “The Real History of the GUI“. It’s kinda geeky, but it’s quite a good read to know how your computer came about.

My first computer (it’s my dad’s one, actually) was a whopping 80486 running Windows 3.11 and DOS 6.22 back in 1995 (Primary 4). Instead of perusing textbooks and slaving over assessment books like local school kids do, I read through the entire DOS 6.22 manual, which by the way is thicker than all my Primary 4 and 5 textbooks combined. My repertoire of knowledge in DOS soon grew way beyond my dad’s “dir/w”, “copy ” “mkdir”. The constant experimentation with the PC caused countless of reformats and reinstallation by a 10-year-old, with him getting more proficient each time than the previous.

I only managed to convince my dad to upgrade our Windows 3.11 to Windows 95 after I wrongly bought a game, Cyberstorm (I think), that required DirectX (i.e. Windows 95) to play. I bought myself a book on Windows 95 (can’t exactly remember the title, but it’s some Expert Guide to Win 95), went through it more than once (instead of studying, again) and became Microsoft’s unofficial technical helpdesk for all relatives with their computers woes.

Back in my upper primary school days, when kids play games – board or electronic forms, I wanted to make my own games. I was too poor (read: my parents were too ngiao) then to afford the board game Risk that my spoilt and rich neighbours owned. And so, I combined two drawing boards, traced a world map on it from my encyclopedia, stole dices from my brother’s Monopoly and made my own Risk. My aberrant desires to make games (instead of playing them) was only limited to board games. Making your own computer game sounds unattainable to a 10-year-old then.

When I transferred school in Primary 5, this bloke, Alvin, told me that I can make my own computer games. Although Alvin was a bullshitter most of the time, he was right about that. His words and encouragement had utterly destroyed my life as a normal living teenager for the next 6 years to come. I spent my days slaving in front of the computer instead of having a life. I remembered perusing through the help files of QBasic, the program Alvin touted that could materialise my deviant desires, one afternoon and finally managed to draw a circle on the screen. I literally jumped around the house for a full five minutes before hugging my younger brother for joy. It was not until 2 years later in Secondary 1 that Alvin, myself and two other school mates participated in the Cyberwar Zone ’98 competition that I made the first game, Annihilator, with Visual Basic. We eventually made it into the finals (the only Secondary 1 team out of the 6 finalists) though I can’t exactly remember did we rank 4th or 5th. I have since lost the source code, though.

I became the Vice-Chairman of the school’s computer club by Secondary 2 but was eventually overthrown in a coup d’etat by the teachers-in-charge and IT HOD in Secondary 3 due to my recalcitrant ways and for articulating my disdain for inane school policies.

Alvin, Jeremy and myself (and even Weiming, I think!) eventually formed OmniDesigns and created ONAS, a network administration suite that was to be deployed over school computer labs and marketed to LAN shops for easy administration. However, programmers being programmers, we procrastinated and never managed to deliver a final version of it. We never became rich as a result of that but still managed to clinch monetary prizes for the school’s internal IT competitions. There was this renegade group of non-computer club students that were always trying to rival us though, and the IT HOD was so obsessed with them. They went by the lame name of “TyphoonStorm” if I remembered correctly. Admitedlly, they’ve got better marketing executives than we do.

Addendum God, their website is still around and has not changed a bit since 2001. Now this is nostalgic.

Secondary school passed, I collected my ‘O’ Level results and decided at last minute not to do computer studies at polytechnic but to continue rote-learning at a friendly neighbourhood JC. That was perhaps when I decided I didn’t want to do computers for a living. And that is the end of my geeky story. And that was when I last heard from Alvin, I have no idea why he refuses to contact me now. And you must be really bored to read through all that!

Letter: Should Students’ Privacy Be Given More Respect?

Dear Sir/Mdm,

I refer to the article “Poly students in homemade sex video gets counselling” (ST, Feb 22 06).

I am appalled to read that the discipline teacher of the said junior college was bestowed with the authority to conduct “handphone raiding”, i.e. investigating the contents of mobile phones without the owners’ permission, on 5 students in the last half year.

The article noted that one student was unabashed with the circulation of her photographs as she deemed them artistic. Unlike the possession of lewd and obscene materials such as pornographic magazines and VCDs, artistic nudity does not fall within the same category. The former is an obvious breach of local legislation whereas the latter is not. In fact, many Singaporeans were reported to have paid for artistic nude photographs of themselves taken by professionals for personal keepsake in the wake of Mr Steve Chia’s incident in 2003. Mr Steve Chia was not charged for the possession of the nude photos of his maid and himself.

By conducting unauthorised investigation into the students’ handphones, the teacher concerned had infringed the privacy of these students when the photographs could have been merely artistic nudity meant for personal viewing and keepsake. It could also cause potential embarassment to the students for the photographs were never meant to be shared with a teacher. I would personally cringe at the thought of someone sieving through even my personal messages without my permission.

Handphone raiding is socially unacceptable and generally considered an extremely rude behaviour even amongst friends. It is akin to gaining unauthorised entry into one’s email account and is evidently an infringement of one’s privacy. What is MOE’s stand on such practices and whether educators should be empowered to probe into personal materials of students? Whilst it is imperative that educators inculcate the right moral values in our children, we should be mindful not to overstep the boundaries of our jurisdiction.

Follow your heart, prudently

I read on the forums today, a man found out that his girlfriend of 10 years and buddy of 8 have been seeing each other. And you thought this only happens in TV dramas and soap operas. But trust me that not everyone will sympathise with this poor man.

I recalled once when my better half called me up in tears after watching a drama on an attached woman who fell for another man but never got together. What was aberrant was that my better half was weeping for the wretched couple and not the poor man.

Perhaps, being a man myself, I was inclined to empathise with the poor man more than I could with the new couple. However, being a soap opera, I believe much of the show was focused on how the woman finally realised that the new man is her true love (you know, after all these years).

The sentimental audience would of course be emotionally obligated to support the newfound love of the woman. After all, in the era of individualism and liberalism, we are indoctrinated to follow our heart regardless of its costs. It doesn’t really matter how long or how much you used to love each other for the only thing that matters now is that you have eyes for someone else now.

True, couples who, in the absence of love, remain together for the sake of responsibility are foolish. But couples who went through years of thick and thin and decide that there isn’t any more love are the most abominable.

Here’s a paradox for you: Follow your heart, prudently.

Girls

Another extract of a MSN conversation with my better half. Xemus is her 4-year-old cousin who happens to like to stick to me and not her.

Sharon: but xemus is so cute
Sharon: i jus grab any chance to make him hug me
Sharon: so chubby
Sharon: lol
bAa: lol
Sharon: i used to carry him sleep till my arm numb lo
Sharon: but he like dun like me leh
Sharon: i think its the age gap la
bAa: age gap?!
bAa: we’re same age
bAa: lol
Sharon: no me and him
Sharon: but u boy ma
Sharon: tt age of boys tend to think girls are yucky
Sharon: ur age one think girls are yummy
Sharon: kayz
bAa: LOL
bAa: TT’S DAMN FUNNY
bAa: MUS BLOG TT
Sharon: WAT