Thursday, November 27, 2008

11 Rules for Students from Bill Gates, the richest man in the world

In Bill Gates' book, Business @ The Speed of Thought, he lays out 11 rules that students do not learn in high school or college, but should.

He argues that our feel-good, politically correct teachings have created a generation of kids with no concept of reality who are set up for failure in the real world.

RULE 1 - Life is not fair; get used to it.

RULE 2 - The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.

RULE 3 - You will NOT make 40 thousand dollars a year right out of high school. You won't be a vice president with a car phone, until you earn both.

RULE 4 - If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss. He doesn't have tenure.

RULE 5 - Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping; they called it opportunity.

RULE 6 - If you mess up, it's not your parents' fault, so don't whine about your mistakes, learn from them.

RULE 7 - Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you are. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parents' generation, try "delousing" the closet in your own room.

RULE 8 - Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life has not. In some schools they have abolished failing grades; they'll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer. This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.

RULE 9 - Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off, and very few employers are interested in helping you find yourself. Do that on your own time.

RULE 10 - Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

RULE 11 - Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.

Deng Xiao Ping visits America

鄧小平出訪美國

1978年,鄧小平復出,大局底定後,即出訪美國。首站到華盛頓,離開華府前一日舉辦感謝晚宴,宴會前讓新聞記者提問。他的翻譯人員首度出國開洋葷,大喝牛奶、大啃牛排,結果肚子鬧革命,一到會場就上洗手間蹲馬桶,清除反革命份子餘孽。

記者等得不耐煩,就開始發問。第一個記者問鄧小平:「請問美國的首都在哪一個城市?」鄧小平簡直鴨子聽雷,根本聽不懂,他猜想,中國人見到陌生人總是問:「請問貴姓?」他就硬者頭皮回答:「我姓鄧。」

美國記者聽到鄧小平準確回答「華盛頓」,非常驚訝。

第二個記者繼續追問:「你在華盛頓除了官式行程,還做了什麼活動?」鄧小平想,中國人問完「貴姓」之後,通常會再問:「大名是什麼?」他就用四川國語回答:「小平。」

記者對他居然能用英語說shopping,感到不可思議。

第三個記者又考問他:「請問台灣的領導人是誰?」鄧小平眼見記者不懷好意,頻頻追問,開始焦急起來。他一面望著大門,看翻譯回來沒有,一方面對記者說:「你等會兒!」

記者以為他回答「李登輝」,佩服不已。

又再問他:「請你再研判一下,李登輝的接班人是誰?」鄧小平被問得不耐煩,揮揮手說:「隨便!隨便!」

美國記者以為他預言那時是台北市議員的陳水扁,將繼李登輝之後當總統。

記者又繼續追問他:「陳水扁之後,那又是誰?」

鄧小平實在招架不住了,為了阻止記者繼續發問,他舉起酒杯,高聲說:「飲酒!飲酒!」



Monday, November 24, 2008

A touching story from a West Malaysian doctor - Don't neglect Sabah , please

This account below, by a West Malaysian doctor, about the plight of the poverty stricken Sabah villagers, is so touching, and so shocking at the same time, that I cannot resist posting it here for all who are interested to read and to know, that Sabahans are well and truly being left behind by the mainstream Malaysian and State Governments, political Parties and politicians!

By: Another Doctor Sep 8, 08 5:11pm

I refer to the Malaysiakini article Kota Marudu needs more than wireless Internet. I read Dr Hams letter and cannot help but agree with many of his observations.

I worked in Sabah for over seven years as a house officer and medical officer. After my housemanship, I was sent to Ranau to serve in the district hospital. What Dr Hams described in Kota Marudu is not something isolated to that district alone in Sabah.

It is an often repeated story in the whole of Sabah. My first introduction to the poverty in Sabah came during my first months there, when a sweet 70-year-old lady from Kota Marudu was sent to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital with deep jaundice. She lived alone in a small village off Kota Marudu and noticed the jaundice about a month before.

She had no money for the taxi fare and so waited a month to sell off her chickens to have enough money to pay RM50 for the transport to Kota Marudu Hospital. She had to walk two miles to get to the road to get to the taxi. Having been born, bred and educated in Peninsular Malaysia, I was shocked.

When she arrived, she was septic and had a gallstone lodged in her common bile duct. The stone was duly removed but she was found to have a heart problem that required a pacemaker. We arranged for her to get a permanent pacemaker but she refused. When I pressed her for her reason, she told me that she couldn't afford to buy batteries for the pacemaker, having sold off her chickens. Once I explained to her that the batteries would last for years and we would provide them, she agreed to the pacemaker.

Ranau town itself has roads and is on the main highway between Sandakan and Kota Kinabalu. It developed primarily as a result of the Mamut Copper Mines in the district. However, highway in this context means a two lane road with frequent landslides and potholes, with a two-hour drive to Kota Kinabalu.

Outside Ranau, transportation becomes a problem as tarred roads disappear to become gravel or crudely marked logging trails. Anyone who has worked in Sabah would have the same stories to tell, of extreme poverty and poor transportation.

During my 2 years in Ranau, I've heard and seen it all, patients with cerebral malaria, a condition unheard of in Peninsular Malaysia, coming in after 48 hours to the hospital from places like Kaingaran and Karagasan, with relatives having to push the 'pirate taxi' through the mud, spending RM50 on fare during the monsoon season, the equivalent of 2 months income, this too when petrol was only around RM1.20 a litre in Ranau.

Patients having to delay treatment for life threatening conditions because a bridge washed away along the trail (I won't even call it a road) to Tambunan. Emergency surgery such as caesarian sections, appendectomies and even ectopic pregnancies had to be performed in our little district hospitals by Medical Officers with little more than 4 months housemanship experience.

Medical emergencies such as myocardial infarctions, which in Peninsular Malaysia would be managed in a Coronary Care Unit setting, had to be managed in the district hospital level. I'm grateful however, that my staff in that hospital were the best I've ever had the pleasure of working with and were dedicated enough to want to make a difference in their patients' lives.

But poor transportation does not only affect the access to healthcare. Having no roads to be able to transport their agricultural produce for sale means that these people are stuck in a never ending cycle of poverty. At most, some of them get RM20 to RM50 by selling their produce to middlemen to be sold at the monthly tamu or market at prices that are perhaps only 10 percent of the value of the goods.

These innocent people are also preyed upon by traveling cloth merchants, mostly foreigners, who offer them 'easy payment schemes' to buy cloth for clothes, and when they cannot pay for the cloth and the interest accumulates, they end up having to marry their daughters to these men, who often have wives back home in Pakistan.

One of the cases I could never forget was of the family who came to Ranau Hospital just as I was leaving, a family who had failed crops, were hungry and unable to get food. The father collected some toad eggs and fed them to the whole family in a desperate attempt to stave off hunger.

When they arrived at our little emergency room, one of the children were dead and two passed away within 10 minutes of arrival in our casualty unit due to poisoning.

Education is a problem in parts of Sabah outside major towns like Kota Kinabalu at the moment. Many children would be lucky to be able to get to a school or even afford to get to one. Most of my patients outside Ranau were lucky to even have a primary school education and a vast number of women marry in their teens.

I've had 14 year olds delivering babies in Ranau, most of them have never ever stepped foot in a school. The education level is so poor that many women feed their children condensed milk thinking that it's better than breast milk. But at the heart of it all, these mothers want the best for their children but are not empowered with the knowledge to help them.

Major towns in Sabah have electricity courtesy of the Sabah Electricity Board, but smaller villages have either diesel generators or rely on candles or lamps when night falls. How can children study in these conditions?

Like many doctors in the districts, I had to learn Dusun to communicate better with these patients who could speak little else.

Forty five years after the formation of Malaysia, the promise of a better life for these poor Dusun, Murut and Rungus patients in the districts of Sabah is a pipe dream at best. How can our politicians claim to have brought development to the state and have neglected these poor people, many of whom still wear the cheap t-shirts and caps given free by political parties from many elections ago.

How can I claim to be proud of Putrajaya with it's beautiful bridges and lamp posts and the Petronas twin Towers when our fellow Malaysians in Sabah are so neglected?

The cycle of poverty and illiteracy one sees in the districts in Sabah brings despair to the heart. Eradication of poverty must tackle the real issues of education and transport and not just handouts to poor people.

By all means, declare Sept 16th a public holiday, but remember it in it's real context, where we made a promise to our brethren in Sabah and Sarawak to treat them as equals in Malaysia, and give them the development they've been long denied.

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Optical illusion - this is weird!

Look at the centre of the picture. It seems as though the squares in the middle are moving, but nothing is actually moving. It's only a still drawing.



Illusion - is that possible?



Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Perception test

Watch the video where you go through a Perceptual test, and maybe learn that apparently some of us miss the obvious when we have too many things going on.

It may signal to us to not take on too many things at once. Multi-tasking is overrated. Focus is more important.

Awesome military pictures




Guanyin Temple Lahad Datu main altar


Well, here we go!

First post on the first blog of my own.
I intend to post interesting things on this blog.
Videos and photos, poetry and prose, snippets and anecdotes.
On health, wealth and wisdom!
Of interests, of learning, of humour, of passion, of love!