Friday 30 March 2007

My Partial Music Taste

Just to clear up: "partial" here means "bias", as in not impartial.

I am not a good musician, but I did received a few years of musical training, so I can tell if someone is singing out of tune. I also took a few English and Chinese lessons while in school, so I can distinguish profound, well thought out lyrics from crappy unimaginative ones. That is to say, given a modern popular song, I can more or less rate it based on its composition and performance. As of late I have chosen to ignore these metrics and instead relied solely on my feelings. In practice this means a song is rated based on 1) voice of singer, 2) performance, 3) music, 4) lyrics, in that order.

To judge a song by the singer's voice is of course a little biased, because a person's voice is more or less fixed at birth and training doesn't change it (training only allows better control of the singer's voice). Thus I am saying that if I like someone's voice, I don't care if the lyric is crap, or the singing is a bit off. It is almost as bad as saying I like the song if the singer looks good. So let my explain why.

I have been listening to music for some time now. I have learned that everyone has their favourite types of music, that there are no universal rating system that fits everyone. Thus we shouldn't impose a set of rules that compares two songs scientifically. This comparison should be done by individual listeners, each with their own verdict.

Music, no matter how grand or skilfully performed, boils down to a bunch of sound frequencies. Saying "I like this song" just means that particular combination of sounds appeals to my ear. It makes no difference whether that sound is the result of practising day and night or just pure talent. I should not have to like a song because it was well performed or well written. It should be because I enjoy listening to it over and over again. Modern pop songs usually uses the same instruments: piano, guitar, drums, and sometimes a little violin or flute. What is always different, however, is the singer's voice. To me, the "right" voice gives me enough utility (or pleasure, if it is not too suggestive for you) to offset the amount I lose from occasional flaws in the performance.

When I started taking piano lessons many years ago, assessing a piece of music meant looking at the execution. Are there any wrong notes? Is it out of tune? Is the rhythm correct? It's like taking an aural test. Nowadays, the questions I ask are: does the music sound pleasant? Does it make me emotional? Does part of the lyrics touch me? Much more relaxing this way, and isn't that the reason we listen to music?

Thursday 29 March 2007

My Timid Classmates

It is almost incomprehensible that I, of all people, would accuse anyone of being shy or timid. If anything, I should be guilty of the crime, being one who seldom speaks up, and even then only in a small voice. However this is the situation in a particular engineering subject. It turns out that our lecturer enjoys asking questions frequently, which I think is a good idea as the interaction keeps us awake and lets her find out our progress. Unfortunately, our class doesn't like to answer questions, regardless of the difficulty. As a result there were a lot of awkward pauses during the lecture, which did no one any good. Lately I just couldn't stand it anymore, so I began to respond to the questions.

The only reason I can think of for people to keep their mouths shut is they do not know what to say, or are afraid their answers are wrong. Or maybe some people treat lectures as watching TV, and one should be as passive as possible while watching TV except for laughing at funny comments. The same thoughts may have crossed my mind before I speak up, but I try hard to ignore them. I am a student learning a new topic, and I certain don't admit to be the smartest student at that. Who cares if I give a wrong answer? I find myself happier knowing I have contributed and get it wrong, than if I had stayed quiet and congratulate myself silently for getting the right answer.

OK, back to my classmates and my rant of the day. I don't think they are any dumber than I am. One doesn't survive three years of Melbourne Uni with sheer luck. Thus my conclusion is that they are just very lazy, something along the lines of, "let someone else answer it. I'm not even gonna waste my breath..." Oh, it is also no coincidence that over half the class are Asians, and those who do speak up are usually not one of them. Except me, of course.

Sunday 25 March 2007

Time-Shifting TV

I think for the last few weeks, I had been time-shifting all TV shows. In other words, I "taped" them onto my computer and watched them later. The obvious reason is so that I can get on with more important things such as doing my homework, but another perhaps equally important reason is I might have built up a zero tolerance on TV ads. It is a well known fact that a programme that lasts an hour on TV is only about 40 minutes on a DVD, ad-free. Therefore this is not so much a protest against TV ads than an attempt to save precious time for other more important things, such as doing my homework. (I know I am repeating myself) Actually, I had been skipping ads since the days of the VHS tapes. I would stop the player and fast forward (it's quicker this way) about 3 minutes, a delicate process since it was very easy to overshoot the mark. Nowadays, VLC player allows me to fast forward by one minute or 10 seconds with shortcut keys and does so with no delays. This creates even greater incentive for me skip ads and now I cannot tolerate breaks between programmes. To demonstrate how far I have gone, even if I am free to watch a show "live", I will still record and watch it later, preferring to spend that time on other tasks such as, need I repeat, doing my homework.

To digress a little, I want to point out this approach to consume TV (on a computer) is not really new to me. The day I landed in Melbourne for my uni degree I knew I would do all my video watching on a computer. This is why my house had no TV -- my sister and I both watched TV on our computers. (We now have one for mum though) In fact, incorporating television into my computer means I can do without a tape recorder and a DVD player. When DVD recorders with built-in hard drives came out I frowned at the idea. For the same price I could have 10 times the storage and much more flexibility in manipulating the content. There is no doubt that even in the future, "dumb" appliances such as stand-alone disc players will never make it into my home. Either the content go through the computer or I will not consume it.

Saturday 24 March 2007

Progress Report

In my last post I talked of remove the so-called "bloat" in my life. I am happy to report that I have made some further progress in that area. I have dropped Without A Trace from my list of must-watch TV shows. It's not that the show is not good, but compared to the other five or six programmes still on my list, this one is giving me diminishing returns (of utilities, for those economists out there).

Another thing that happened only last night is that I will conditionally open PowerPoint files received in my Gmail. It works like this: I will first check out the contents of the PowerPoint using the "view in HTML" feature available in Gmail. This only shows the text in the presentation, but is usually enough for me to decide whether the download is worthwhile. The reason for this arrangement is twofold. Firstly, I have discovered it is much quicker to let Gmail make a web page out of the PowerPoint and open that web page in my browser, than to download the entire PowerPoint file and wait for MS PowerPoint to load up. As most of you should know, most PowerPoint files in our mailbox are big because the author decided to decorate each slide with a different background image, which doesn't add much impact to the message anyway. It is also much quicker to read the text on a web page than wait for the paragraphs to finish animating. The second reason is some of my friends keep sending me the same thing over and over. They don't seem to mind watching the show for the fifth time and have even less problem forwarding it to their entire mail list. Unfortunately I don't have the time or patience to read repeats, so a filtering mechanism is needed.

Speaking of PowerPoints, isn't 90% of any such files pure bloat, in the form of backgrounds, frivolous animations and even sound effects, and background music? This is unfortunate because sometimes the text is well written and does deserve a read. All the other crap does nothing but distracts the reader from thinking about the words. It's better to send a plain text email in this case, since everyone can start reading with no waiting time. Another type of PowerPoint presentations contains only pictures; it is basically a slide show with music. I don't know why anyone thinks PowerPoint is a good program to show off pictures, because all it ever does is stretch the image to make it look ugly. Isn't it much better to just attach the pictures to the email, perhaps zipping it if there are lots of them, and let me open them with IrfanView together with whatever background music I fancy? That way if I like a certain picture I can add it to my collection, something not doable in PowerPoint. In conclusion, the supposedly fancy features in PowerPoint are the things you shouldn't be using, even in a real presentation. The best lecture slides are the ones with a plain background, mostly text in bullet points and the occasional picture. Animations just make you dizzy.

Monday 12 March 2007

Un-bloat My Life

Many months ago I blogged about clearing my Windows desktop. This has largely been done. Items that survived the cut are what I use on a daily basis. I have also stopped launching programs that served no functional purposes.

In another previous post, I indicated an interest in applying the same principle to my life. This ambitious project has commenced and some progress has been made. One example is eating, which I mentioned in the last post. Although eating is an essential part of anyone's life, usually only a small part of that actually contributes to satisfying one's hunger -- the rest is about satisfying the taste buds or a psychological reaction to the value of the food being consumed. To me the latter parts are not that important so I paid less attention to them. I call these unimportant things "bloat", and there is no better time to remove bloat when I barely have enough time to keep up with uni work. And by keep up I mean 100% on top of taught materials.

It is very important to distinguish removing bloat and removing distractions. The latter could potentially include everything not directly related to my studies. This is not what I'm trying to get rid of. I still have a life outside of uni work, thank you. Rather I seek to track down activities that I don't really want or need to do, things that I do because I can (most likely to avoid doing any real work), and put a stop to them. For this reason I am not going to stop watching TV but will only watch programs that genuinely interest me. For example, I finally convinced myself 24 is so unrealistic it's not worth investing an hour per week just to find out the ending. I have a feeling Iron Chef will soon follow for being too repetitive but unable to improve my culinary skills. I can think of a few more examples but that will just impose more bloat on everyone, so I shall move on to conclusions.

For a computer, the less programs you have running the faster it will process tasks. I cannot tell you how much faster Windows Vista runs when it loses all the cosmetic bloat. The same goes for life. Sure I can do this and that and a million other things, but if they do not benefit me that much maybe it's time to switch activities rather than clinging onto the status quo.

Tuesday 6 March 2007

The Boring Old Life

After a mere 22 odd years of living in cities, I am thoroughly tire of it. To me, an average day would involve working, eating, followed by some entertainment. This daily routine is so repetitive and uninteresting that I can no longer get any excitement out of it. While I will continue to work, eat and play in order to survive, I don't think I really care if I'm doing job A or job B, eating Pizza or KFC, watching TV or surfing the net for news, and so on. There is the feeling that none of these things can add to my experience in a substantial way, regardless of the choices. Thus I am becoming less particular about my choices.

One of the most obvious changes is my diet -- I simply don't care too much what I eat, as long as it's not too unhealthy. Next is my career ambition. As of late, a new possibility, namely working the financial sector, had opened up and I can no longer be sure I will be an engineer after graduating from uni. The ambiguity arises because I can no longer say one field interests me more than the other, which is to say I am interested in neither one.

This mentality opens up a can of worms. If I have no desires, should I still work so hard? If there's nothing more to get out of this life, is there a reason to still be breathing? I hesitate to declare I am tired of living, as that would be dangerous, and in any case I am not there yet. There is still hope, and reasons to live -- I just have to find it.

One thing I would really like to do is to escape the city, or what known to most of us as civilisation. I need to get away to some place where the inhabitants are not concerned daily with money, career and paying bills. And if that means parting with security, technology and luxuries then so be it. I'm not saying I'll like this for sure, but I'm willing to give it a try.

----------------------------------

If you think this post is confusing, it's because I am not sure where I'm headed. A lot of thought is going through my mind right now. I can see many possibilities. The problem is not whether or how I can achieve any of these, but which one I want to pursue. The above is a snapshot of my mindset now, but it is perhaps just the tip of an iceberg.

Friends

This must sound crazy to a lot of people, but I am not really interested in making lots and lots of friends. It does not mean I want to have no friends, just not a lot of them that I would get calls from friends on a daily (or even weekly) basis, or have people that I would see every day. Curiously enough, often when I am by myself I feel liberating rather than lonely. This contrasts strongly with studies that shows the average Korean kid would be anxious if he or she does not get a phone call every 10 minutes throughout the day.

It is not that I dislike people or their presence, but maintaining a friendly relationship requires investing time doing activities and communicating with the friend. More often than not I would rather spend that time carrying out my own agenda. In other words, I treat time as if it is money, choosing very carefully where I will spend it. Perhaps my attitude would be different if I have unlimited time.

While on the subject of friends, while I may give the impression I am a shy or quiet person, this is simply not the case. While it may be true that I am not good at generating conversations, it is also true that I believe in saying as much as necessary and nothing more. If there is nothing more I want to tell or learn from you, I cease talking. There is no reason to invent a topic that interests neither you nor me. Some people apparently cannot stand the silence and in order to fill the void, they start blurting out random jokes or comments that only cause a laugh because of its vulgarity. Truth be told at times I too feel uncomfortable at these quiet situations but I prefer to be perceived as shy than foolish. If, however, the other party and I share some common interest or knowledge you can be sure I will talk non-stop for a very long time.