Friday 27 July 2007

Away Means Away!

MSN Messenger (you will likely be using Windows Live Messenger, but I don't have XP and can't upgrade to it) lets you set your online status to inform friends whether you are at the computer or not. And I seem to be the only person who believe the status really reflects the person's online status.

I only set my status to "away" or "busy" if I cannot or do not want to reply to an incoming message. If other people set their statuses to something other than "online", I assume they are not available for chatting and refrain from messaging them.

Some people obviously disagree with my interpretation of the statuses, or they just choose to ignore them. I have had people IM'ing me even though I was "away" -- and I really was away. Sometimes the person who initiated the conversation was himself marked "away". I assume they were trying to avoid talking to certain people, though the "appear offline" setting would be much more effective. Alternatively, they can do what I do -- kill the damned memory-hogging program. Anyway, I digressed.

Maybe when my friends message the "away" me, they are just chancing on me not really being away and therefore will reply. They might be right, in that I might really be at the computer. However, that doesn't change the fact that I don't want to be disturbed. To discourage this behaviour, I have adopted the policy of not answering messages if I am "away" or "busy", even if I am at the computer and can answer it. Of course there will be exceptions but if I do break the rule I obviously don't mind the disruption.

The bottom line is this: if I am "away", you won't be getting an answer any time soon, one way or another.

Time is scarce; therefore I am picky

My time is filling up. Apart from eating, sleeping and other "housekeeping" activities, there are uni classes, homework, revision and work. Upon completing these tasks I can move onto more leisurely activities. The problem is, by that stage I am usually left with insufficient time to do all the fun things I planned to do.

Let's use TV as an example. There are many TV shows I like watching. Altogether they roughly add up to 10 hours per week. I simply do not have 10 hours a week for TV, unless I give up all my web surfing, newspaper/book reading and even some optional studying. Therefore I began to reduce the number of shows I would watch, which means being picky about my TV consumption. As my workload increases, so does my pickiness.

So I stop watching every TV show or movie that comes my way, unless they are worthy of my time. I go through the newspaper much quicker than before because I skip the uninteresting columns, the biggest offender being reports about a little boy recovering from cancer in the Royal Children's Hospital: I care about the boy but I do not need to know all the details. The same applies to all web sites.

It turns out that consuming less isn't such a big loss, because I have retained those that mattered most to me. The ones I have dropped can be considered bloat of varying degrees. The result is that I have become more efficient at spending my leisure time.

Who would have thought quality leisure time requires careful planning (opposite of leisure), and that being picky is a good virtue?

Tuesday 17 July 2007

Wii-view

My sister's boyfriend had recently acquired a Nintendo Wii, so I finally had a chance to try out the motion-sensing controller and sampling some of the games.

I'm quite impressed with the controllers. They are more accurate than I would have thought possible, and even knows the way you are holding the controller when you are not waving it around. The games are okay: the five WiiSports games that came with the console made well use of the new controller -- you control the movements as if you are playing the actual sport.

On the other hand, I can't help but feel that Nintendo games are not my cup of tea, at least the games that I have played so far. My first complaint is that all the games are way too cute. The characters in WiiSports don't even have arms and sometimes legs! Another game that I have played, Cooking Mama, suffers from the same problem. Check out their website and you will see what I mean.

The second problem is that the gameplay is so linear. Cooking Mama is about repeating the same cooking steps over and over again, albeit a different combination for each dish. The games in WiiSports are a little simple so there is not much strategy required. All that is needed is mastering the waving of the controller so you execute the precise movement at the right time. In other words, something a robot can do very well.

A third game that I have seen but not played is WarioWare: Smooth Moves. Until that game came along I thought Mario Brothers Party and its mini-games are the worst. Apparently my 3 minute attention span is too long to find 5 second mini-games interesting.

Maybe I am just mad that the Wii gave me sore arms for two days. After all, I did tell myself that I would prefer the Wii over the PS3 and Xbox 360. That statement probably still holds (I haven't played the other two), but my money is definitely going towards a new computer than any of the consoles.

Thursday 12 July 2007

Monday 9 July 2007

Force/mass Confusion

I have just read a news article about the fitness requirements of a Formula-one driver. Due to high accelerations during the races, drivers experience high G-force, which creates stress to their bodies. Below is the article's description of the stress to a driver's neck.
"Head plus helmet weighs 6kg. With added G-forces when cornering, the neck has to support up to 30 kg."
-The Age, 17-03-2007

The article is telling me the cornering G-forces are about 24 kg. Anyone spot the problem? Forces have no mass!! Kilogram -- or more generally, gram -- is a measure of mass, which tells you the amount of "stuff" of an object. A force is not a substance (unless you go into quantum mechanics), so they cannot have any mass. The above sentence implied that G-forces have added additional mass to the head plus helmet system, which is not correct. Rather, the G-forces add to the total downward force exerted on the neck, which originally consisted of just the weight of the head and helmet*.

Since the neck has to support more downward force not more mass it is inappropriate to use a measure of mass, kg. Instead, the sentence should go "...the neck has to support up to 300N.", where "N" refers to Newtons, a measure of force. Note that we arrive at 300N because on Earth, 1kg~10N. However, had the reporter actually written that, no one would understand what he/she meant, so it is better to rephrase it as "...the neck has to support up to an equivalent of 30kg."

* Weight is the gravitational force the Earth (or another large body) exerts on an object and is not equivalent to mass. Strictly speaking, then, it is incorrect to say the head+helmet weighs 6kg, because kg measures mass not force. However, such usage has become mainstream and I shall let it go.

Saturday 7 July 2007

Guilty Conscience

One day in uni I saw a girl trying to promote some cause or club activity. She was approaching a guy walking by. The guy acted as if he was caught shoplifting, as he hastily made up an excuse, saying he was late for class, and promptly sped towards the student union building, which never held any classes. Now I am not trying to stereotype, but does that guy have to be an Asian, probably a Chinese?

I thought it was strange that the guy looked like he was guilty of something, when he was the one getting approached. Why was it necessary to lie to the girl? If he did not want to be disturbed, then just say so. Soon I had it figured out: he felt guilty because he turned the girl down. He made up an excuse so he could blame his "crime" on it. You see, the lie wasn't for the girl, it was for himself. "I wanted to stick around and listen, but I have classes so it's okay to kill the conversation" is probably what he was thinking.

It might seem I have over-analysed the situation, but I'm quite confident this is the guy's mindset. Why? Although I am no psychologist, I am a Chinese.

Sunday 1 July 2007

A Bitter Lesson

I have been ordering coffee without sugar for almost two month now. To tell the truth, coffee sans sugar can be quite hard on the taste buds. Sometimes they are rather bitter, other times they are simply tasteless. Initially I was reluctant to admit that, and preferred to think of it as part of the "transitional period", firmly believing my palate will eventually adjust to the new taste. It did, eventually, though that doesn't mean sugarless coffee starts to taste sweet. That just doesn't happen.

Instead, I began to accept the bitter taste (there is no acceptance for tasteless coffee though; they are simply bad). I realised coffee is supposed to be bitter and not sweet. Sure it is possible to sweeten it by adding sugar, but then you won't be drinking coffee but some mixture of coffee and sugar. As far as sampling good coffee goes, the sugar just gets in the way.

This concept can be extended to other things. Music video, for example, adds moving pictures to a piece of music. Nearly all the time the video portion adds nothing substantial to the music. They don't tell a story, or even show anything related to the theme of the song. In short, they are random images that gets in the way. The video acts just like a sweetener, distracting you from the main focus -- the music.

Alas, everyone needs to taste something sweet once in a while in order to remain sane. My goal is therefore balancing the need to sample the true qualities of coffee or music or story, and the desire to just enjoy them without engaging the part of my brain that judges their qualities.