st forum

I always start my day with the Straits Times Online forum. As depressed, twisty and damaged I am, I always feel alot better after reading the forum. If only life was one big ST forum.

Today, in addition to said emotional states, I didn't get any sleep the whole night, started to work too early in the morning, got drenched twice and one of my clients whom I am particularly attached to requires major surgery. Not a good day.

But this letter is a classic:

University lecturers who upload class notes at 11th hour inconvenience students

I WOULD like to share my experience of the use of e-mail to relay important information. What I encountered is not widespread but it is not an isolated case.

I have a friend who studies in a local university that requires the lecturer to upload class notes and assignments for students. This is a good idea as it reduces not only time but also paper the lecturer would need to photocopy. And most times, there would be extra copies that might go to waste.

However, of late, I have learnt that certain lecturers upload their notes at the 11th hour, that is, at night when the class is first thing the next morning. Although most students have computers at home, some do not have printers. They therefore have to race to school to print their notes before class.

On another occasion, the lecturer sent an e-mail message to my friend that a lesson was scheduled the next day (a last-minute addition to the fixed timetable). The message also asked my friend to tell the other students. Fortunately, my friend knew some of the students and managed to tell them. I am interested to know what would have happened if my friend did not check his e-mail that day. Would the lecturer have marked them all absent?

Although I am not a student in this university, I felt the frustration as if I were in my friend's shoes. I am disappointed we are paying for people who are so unprofessional.

Teo Cheng Nam

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I'm really ashamed of myself leh.

Here I am worrying about my non-existent love life, moping about my this month's pay with increment and backpay that is late, trying to figure out how to make a blerdy mysql webby already, and being concerned for my second favorite client's life.

But here we have Mr Teo who is able to transcend such earthly woes and forge his transcendental concerns through the unforgiving fires of public discourse.

I'm really ashamed.

So ashamed I'm inspired to write in also. Here:

"Universities have a part to play in fighting global warming"

I would like to share my experience when I was a student at a top local university at Kent Ridge Crescent.

Every room and lecture theatre is air-conditioned, and freezingly so. I spent lectures and tutorials shivering even with a jacket and a heat pack in the form of my laptop charger. I think if you look around the lecture theatre, it is a common phenomenon [if you don't count of the hot hunks and chicks of course who are by definition hot and therefore can get by in a skimpy singlet or bra]. I suspect this is also a phenomenon experienced in other universities.

I wonder how much of the earth's valuable resources and yong siew toh's money the school is wasting for the singular purpose of freezing the rooms.

Everyday in the papers, we come across the very real and increasing threat of global warming. Even though I am probably not going to be around when that happens, I feel gaea's pain. Ouch.

I hope the universities in Singapore can work together and play their part in fighting this threat.

I suggest opening all the doors at the universities of all the rooms, libraries, offices, lecture theatres and so on and so forth. We can let some of the cold air out to cool the environment down so that the coldness is not just wasted on freezing students.

Chen Lingshen

prophecy 101

The Chinese consider it bad luck to sleep beneath ceiling beams.

Geomancers say it's because ceiling beams are dragon spines, the spine joins the head and the bottom together, and so you're getting dragon fart and spit all over you if you sleep beneath the spine/beam. Very bad luck indeed.

Someone wise told me superstitions often have very practical precedents.

Ceiling beams were necessary in ancient Chinese architecture because they held the ceiling up [so assassins can go around running on rooftops]. What held the beams up was another question which the Chinese didn't really answer so let's just say eventually those with a genetic disposition to sleep beneath beams all died out.

Fast forwarding abit, in the news recently, 'China has banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government permission'.

I always thought Buddhist rebirth was like an amusement park. You go around getting tokens and exchanging them for the appropriate prize with what you've got when the time comes.

Apparently, the Dalai Lama has enough tokens to get a wild card. He refuses 'to be reborn in Tibet so long as it's under Chinese control', and all Dalai Lamas are supposedly able to control their rebirth.

Personally, I think the Dalai Lama voided his wild card when he put on them guccis and raybans.

But as he foretells, the next Dalai Lama will not be born in Tibet so long as it's under Chinese control because it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Once the Dalai Lama dies, his followers are going to look for the next Dalai Lama only among the Tibetans who are not in Tibet and they will find some poor child malleable and bendable enough who has done some miracle according to someone who heard from someone who saw it.

The good thing about prophets is you don't need job consistency.

And the next Dalai Lama will not be re-born in Tibet.