Should we speak....I mean can we speak?

The latest ISA arrest (3 people - 1 was released within 24hours) instills fear. Lawfully speaking, ISA is supposed to instill fear in "bad" people and create safe feeling in "good" people.

Without any doubt, the ISA has instilled fear and the safe feeling among the people. The only problem is, we do not know who are the bad people and who are the good people.

If there is a terrorist roaming around the country and pose a threat to the safety of the people and the security of the nation, then the arrest of this terrorist will create safe feeling among the people and instill fear among other terrorists.

What happened in Malaysia on the 13th September 2008, made me wonder who are feeling safe now and who are frightened now?

Freedom of speech and freedom of information are inter related. When someone wish to express himself, it is called as freedom of speech. When someone wants to know what was said, then there comes the freedom of information. The media acts as the conveyor. The claims of misinterpretations are baseless because, if it can be misinterpretated, then the information was not spoken clearly. Simple Murphy's Law - If something can go wrong, it will go wrong.......if something can be wrongly interpreted, then it will be wrongly interpreted.

Same like many others, I too think that we have freedom of speech and freedom of thoughts but.......the question is ............Should we speak....I mean can we speak? I don't even know whether we can ask?
Subra

Sin Chew reporter released
http://www.thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2008/9/13/nation/2022372&sec=nation

The least respected colour in Malaysia

All of us travel a lot on the road everyday. We come across many traffic lights. Traffic lights are a communicating tool. The colour of the light indicates to us on what to do. Simple enough, "RED" means we should come to a complete stop before the line marker or right behind the vehicle which is before the line marker. "GREEN" you can move your vehicle to your desired direction. Sometimes you will see arrowed "RED" and "GREEN", which means the same except it only applies to the direction indicated by the arrow.

Then there is another colour called by so many names.... "AMBER", "ORANGE", "YELLOW" and so on. We name it as "YELLOW". This yellow comes after the green. It means, slow down your vehicle and get ready to stop. In some places, yellow comes after the red too. It means, get ready to move your vehicle.

Anyhow the "YELLOW" that comes out after the green has been abused terribly. Once we see the green vanishing and the yellow emerging, we press the accelerator harder that anything and we usually beat F1 drivers' over-taking speed. Even some of us have "turbo-charged" engine that cannot be stopped once we have pressed the accelerator. In aviation it is called as "V1" signal ; take-off cannot be aborted. Most of the traffic light system doesn't have the yellow coming after after the red (or before the green). Most of us will look for the yellow on the other side's traffic light. Once we see the yellow light for theother lane, we start to move our vehicle (not getting prepared to move the vehicle but move the vhicle itself).

We will come to an understanding that we will be ready to forgive the abuse of the "YELLOW" when we see how the "RED" is disrespected totally.

In today's situation in Malaysia, the "RED" light in the traffic light system means,

• Stop or
• Slow down
• Look for any policeman, if none, proceed to go
• Strictly don't bother about the road user who has the "GREEN" traffic light signal

You can see this happening at almost every traffic lights, regardless of heavy traffic or not. Motorcyclists have never been bothered about the "RED" light at the traffic lights. Nowadays, even car drivers are also following this trend. Just try to count the number of happenings when you are on road today.

The worst which I cannot digest is the one at Jalan Heng Choo Thian & Jalan Bagan Luar junction. The Butterworth Police Station is just adjacent to this junction and yet many motorist beat the "RED" and move on. It seems that none are bothered about the police station nearby.

Anyhow, I think that the police are still respected in some way but the least respected colour in Malaysia is RED light.

Subra

Choose your camera

Every event is great and the only way to capture them and relive them is by registering them in your memory. Unfortunately, all things cannot be registered in the memory. Or, maybe the brain is capable of registering everything but you cannot retrieve it when you want.....in other word you forget.

Then came the technology to help you to remember these great moments. Photographs ! Yes, photographs helps you to remember back that great moment. A simple glance at the photo and your entire life brightens up. Your memory travels back to that moment and you re-live that moment again.

That is the greatness of a photo and all these can happen because there is a device called camera. You want to choose a good camera, you can refer to the great cameraman for their advise, but usually they don't have time to advise you. That leaves you with the next best method - check the kind of camera these professional cameraman use.

Attached herewith is a photo of great cameramen. Currently they are on a critical assignment, They have no time to talk to you but you can see the types of cameras they are using. You can see the type of lens they have and also the colour of the cameras; seldom see white colours on big cameras.

* Note how they use big zooms to take a picture of person standing so near to them.

Please choose your camera.


you can visit the below mentioned site to read about a photographer who is covering the Beijing 2008 Swimming event. Quite interesting.

http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080817/BLOG26/80817011/1236

Cheers on somebody's failure !

Hungarian Formula 1 race for the 2008 season was held last Sunday 3rd August. My family and few other friends gathered at my brother's house in Penang. It was actually 2 in 1 gathering. My nephew's (S. Yoga) birthday was on the 4th and since it was a Monday we decided to celebrate it on the 3rd August. the race starts at 8:00pm Malaysian time (2:00pm Hungarian time).

I think I need to state it clearly that we are McLaren Mercedes supporters - our favourite drivers are Lewis Hamilton and Heiki Kovailanen.

The pole position was a great advantage for our team. Lewis was on position 1, Heiki on position 2, Felipe (Ferrari) was on 3rd position and Kimi (Ferrari) was on the 6th position.

We were very happy that our team had great advantage and we thought it is going to be a one two win for McLaren. Everything went crushing when Felipe made a great start and managed to squeeze himself to the front by overtaking Heiki and Lewis at the beginning of the race itself.
















We were very disappointed and started the usual cursing tactic on the Ferrari. To add to our outcry, Lewis car had a punture and had to drive half the circuit on slow speed before coming into the pitstop to change the tires. He re-entered the circuit at the 10 position and managed to reach 6th position at his maximum speed. Things looked as if Felipe will win this race, Heiki will be 2nd and Lewis will be in the 6th position, but something we were longing to see happened suddenly. Felipe's Ferrari had an engine failure at the 67th lap (total laps 70).

His car came to a dead stop and he was out of the race.
At that point you should see my brother's house, it was filled with victory shouts.
I wonder why were we very happy at somebody's failure.
















This does not only happen when we are supporting our favourite team (of any sports) but also happens in our life. We tend to pay less attention and put in less effort in our work. We want easy victory, we don't want competition. We rather pray for the other people's failure in order for us to feel happy although we did not win either.

We tend to cheer for other people's failure rather than cheering for our own victory. Anyhow the Hungarian Formula 1 race was great, we had a great time and we were very happy. Just think about it.....if you have time.

Cheers on somebody's failure....is actually jeers to ourself.....................

Subra

http://www.formula1.com/news/features/2008/8/8201.html

* In the 1st picture, you can see how Felipe managed to squeeze himself from the 3rd position to the 1st position and in the 2nd picture you can see Felipe's car breaksdown with smoke coming out at the rear.

Latest information of the current time.....

My family members were discussing about a wrist watch -Tag Heuer - in our family egroup . I made some look-up and indicated few points to signify the wrist watch and its worth. I highlighted it as, "Simple wrist watch with hour, minute and seconds hands". One of my cousin brother (K. Kumar) made a great remark which I cannot erase off from my memory.

He said, "With the hour, minute and seconds hand included – you can actually have the latest information of the current time (which normally changes every second…) – That’s amazing ..!!"

Till then I didn't realise that the current time changes every second.

What a great guy. As usual, something will trigger something and my thoughts went to wonder around on how else watches are being designed. I came across a website/blogspot with an exciting name "adult style watches", although my mind knew it could not be something wrong, my mind was still expecting something else......!

They were showing and reviewing unique watches.

The one which caught my attention is called as "Shinshoku".

I don't know how practical it is but if you are able to count 1-14 correctly, you should be able to use this watch easily.

The Red LED indicates the hour (1 to 12 LED), The Green LED indicates completion of 15 minutes {0 green LED, 0 minutes, 1 green LED, 15 minute, 2 green LED, 3 minutes, 3 green LED, 45 minutes, The Yellow LED indicates 1 to 14 minutes which you are supposed to add together with the green LEDs.}

All these technologies are developed because we need to know the latest information of the current time.... (which normally changes every second)

Subra

http://adult-style-watches.blogspot.com/2008/07/industrially-designed-watches.html

http://adult-style-watches.blogspot.com/

Red, green, yellow and white - my garden

One recent Sunday, I woke up quite early (7am), since I was up early, my wife asked me to send my daughter to her extra class at 8am. (Lesson learnt - do not wake up early on Sunday morning).

After dropping my daughter in her class, I was at home wondering what to do. I saw my camera bag and decided to do some house-keeping like charging the batteries, downloading the pictures, clearing up the memory card and so on. Suddenly it crossed my mind on why not shoot some pictures of the flowers and greenery around my house. There goes the "house-keeping" idea and started a new mess in the house. All the items inside my camera bag were out and scattered around the living hall.

Apart from the mess inside the house, things outside my house started to get messy. You know, we have to believe that we are "professional" photographers in order to get good pictures. This requires changing of the flower pot locations, the direction of the flowers, putting some boxes to raise the height of the plants, chairs to give the so called professional photographer some height to get super pictures and so on. Please remember, my wife was not around the house when this was happening.

The photography fiesta started and my God, it was really great. I really enjoyed the session and admired the greatness of my camera (note this point: admired the camera, not the so called professional photographer).

Although I tried some manual changes in the settings, I still liked the auto mode. I was happy with the pictures and felt good. Like what I said in my earlier writing, the "feel good" that I get from this camera is the return of my investment.

When I looked at the pictures, I noticed that I have a very distinguished colour compilation, and this represents my garden.

Red, green, yellow and white - my garden.

Subra

The pictures can be viewed at

http://www.flickr.com/photos/28612905@N03/

Want to believe it or not, it is your choice !

Yesterday’s (15th July 08) debate between Anwar and Shabery on reducing the petrol price made me recall a word I heard long time ago, “SCOTOMA”. Meaning extracted from dictionaries sounds like this :-

“Scotoma”
A scotoma (Greek: darkness; plural: "scotomas" or "scotomata") is an area or island of loss or impairment of visual acuity surrounded by a field of normal or relatively well-preserved vision.Every normal mammalian eye has a scotoma in its field of vision, usually termed its blind spot. The presence of this normal scotoma does not intrude into consciousness because it is very small, but it can be demonstrated to oneself by the simplest of clinical methods (such as the one in the blind spot article).

Apart from this one word, the debate also helped me to recall a phrase,

“The mind sees what it wants to see”.

Who was the winner of this debate?

I think the question should be whom do you want to be the winner?
Anwar or Shabery?

Relating this to the phrase “The mind sees what it wants to see”, made me ask myself what I wanted from this debate.

The 41%hike in petrol price really took a damaging hit on my family’s daily life. The chain effect of the price hike throughout the supply chain made me dig into my pocket much more deeper. Therefore when I was watching the debate, my mind already tuned it’s radar to look for something good that will soothe my mind and hopefully in real life later.

Automatically, the debate itself has put me on the biased side where, one guy is saying that the price increase is unavoidable and another guy is saying that the price can be reduced. At this juncture I need not to justify my “wants”. It is clear that I am looking for price reduction. My mind started to look for good things that are coming from Anwar’s mouth. On the other hand, whatever Shabery is saying seems to be excuses. Again, remember the prejudice of the mind which has already set it’s mind to be biased. We are human and when the situation is related to our daily life we tend to look for what we want.

This term can be further understood if you look at the scenario of being a jury in a court hearing. If you are one of the victims or related to the victim, you indirectly have compromised your judgment. Therefore you will be looking for statements, points, arguments, evidences, circumstances to substantiate in finding the accused guilty. But if you are totally independent, whereas you are neither related nor linked to the victim or the accused, you will weigh the court proceedings neutrally.

This is the scenario of the people watching Anwar Shabery debate yesterday. I believe all of us were looking for something good. I am very sure that we were never open to the point where the price hike is justified. We were a group of biased people (I don’t mean to offend, that is the reality).

On the word “scotoma”, which I would like to term it in simple as “blind spot”, comes on both debaters. If you really watched closely, you will see some true colours of the debaters prevailing. The blind spot is not visible to us until someone tells us that these things were missing. Anwar termed effected people as “petani”, “nelayan”, ”bumiputera Melayu”, “bumiputera Sabah Sarawak”, “segelintir Cina miskin”, “kaum India di estate”. This point should be looked deeper. What is his actual perception or principal in “serving equally” to all the people. When he defined poverty based on their livelihood activities and race, what does it reflect? Need a lot of thinking on this matter.

As for Shabbery, how can he fail to see that the price hike is not effecting all the people. All the people means: people from the ruling party too. The way he avoided this fact makes me uncomfortable. Or could it be that the people from the ruling party is not effected by the price hike……I don’t know.

Since the mind wants some good feeling, I think the debate has given a little “feel good” to many. Why many feel good? Because if Anwar forms the government, the petrol price will be down by RM0.50 and can even go further down in the future. Want to believe it or not, it is your choice !

Subra

I surfed some website and saw some interesting comments on the Anwar Shabbery debate, browse through on your interest.

http://limadang.com/2008/07/15/dato-anwar-vs-dato-shabery-debate-on-how-to-decrease-fuel-price/
http://kadazanpower.blogspot.com/2008/07/anwar-wins-debate-on-oil.html
http://thedriller.blogspot.com/2008/07/fuel-debate-anwar-vs-shabery.html


“petani” – farmers
“nelayan” – fishermen
”bumiputera Melayu” – son of the soil status local Malays
“bumiputera Sabah Sarawak” – son of the soil of Sabah Sarawak
“segelintir Cina miskin” – A small group of poor Chinese
“kaum India di estate” – Indian ethnic in estates