Ian On The Red Dot

The son introduces the father:

Hearing about how he would commute back just to be with the family, a commute that the son mentioned was four hours, I can’t help but think Singaporeans are generally weak, seeing how we feel about our own commuting experience in Singapore.

Much closer to home – look at the Malaysians who cross over to Singapore everyday to work.

When something is important enough, the strong will make it happen.

Transcript:

Good evening, I’m Beau Biden. And Joe Biden is my dad.

Many of you know him as a distinguished and accomplished senator. I know him as an incredible father and a loving grandfather. A man who hustled home to Delaware after the last vote so he wouldn’t miss me and my brother’s games. Who, after returning from some war-torn region of the world, would tiptoe into our room and kiss us goodnight. Who turns down some fancy cocktail party in Washington so he won’t miss my daughter Natalie’s birthday party.

The truth is, he almost wasn’t a senator at all. In 1972, shortly after his improbable victory, but before he took the oath of office, my father went to Washington to look at his new office space. My mom took us to go buy a Christmas tree. On the way home, we were in an automobile accident. My mom, Neilia, and sister, Naomi, were killed. My brother, Hunter, and I were seriously injured and hospitalized for weeks. I was just short of 4 years old. One of my earliest memories was being in that hospital, Dad always at our side. We, not the Senate, were all he cared about.

He decided not to take the oath of office. He said, “Delaware can get another senator, but my boys can’t get another father.” However, great men like Ted Kennedy, Mike Mansfield, Hubert Humphrey — men who had been tested themselves — convinced him to serve. So he was sworn in, in the hospital, at my bedside. As a single parent, he decided to be there to put us to bed, to be there when we woke from a bad dream, to make us breakfast, so he’d travel to and from Washington, four hours a day.

Five years later, we married my mom, Jill. They together rebuilt our family. And 36 years later, he still makes that trip. So even though Dad worked in Washington, he’s never been part of Washington. He always sounded like the kid from Scranton, Pa., he is. And even that is a story of overcoming.

Now some people poke fun at my dad talking too much. What a lot of people don’t know is that, when he was young, he had a severe stutter. The kids called him Dash — not because he was fast on the football field, which he was, but like a dash at the end of a sentence you can’t finish. But now he speaks with a clear and strong voice. He says what needs to be said. And he does what needs to be done.

When domestic violence was often a dark secret, Dad wrote the Violence Against Women Act, which gave countless women support, protection and a new chance at life. When crime was spiking in our communities, Dad wrote the crime bill that put 100,000 cops on the streets and led to an eight-year drop in crime across the country. When Serbian thugs were committing genocide in the Balkans, Dad didn’t hesitate to call Slobodan Milosevic a war criminal to his face, and to convince Congress and our allies to act. He’s willing to speak truth to power: to the White House and to world leaders.

I know my father will be a great vice president. As I mentioned, my dad has always been there for me, my brother and my sister, every day. But because of other duties, it won’t be possible for me to be here this fall to stand by him the way he stood by me. So I have something to ask of you. Be there for my dad like he was for me.

Be there for Barack Obama because our country needs him. Be there for both of them because millions of families need to know that their best days aren’t behind them, but ahead of them. Be there for both of them because millions of people are trying to overcome, just like my dad overcame. Be there. Be there because Barack Obama and Joe Biden will deliver America the change we so desperately need. Please join me in welcoming my friend, my father, my hero and the next vice president of the United States: Joe Biden.

Just watched WALL-E. It is an awesome show. It deserves a much better rating then the one Ong Sor Fern gave. You should stay and watch the whole ending credits – it is like a concise history of drawing and painting done by humans. Seeing the pixel art on screen made me realize video games were never a big part of my life. Due to a combination of my parents’ frugality, the cost of owning a video game console and their worries that video games would have affected my studies, I never owned a first hand video game console although I did manage to score a Sega Mega Drive (with only 1 game) and PlayStation years after they became passe.

Sad.

However I did manage to play video games because I had friends and neighbors who owned consoles. I vaguely remember playing on the Atari at the holiday resort Awana up at Genting Highlands when we went to Malaysia for a church camp.

Don’t think I ever managed to complete a single video game. Even sadder.

I think I’ll wait until I move to my own place before getting a video game console to compensate for lost time.

A: I can’t believe that girl is using the handicap toilet. There’s nothing wrong with her.

B: There is obviously something wrong with her.

A: Where? She got all her limbs. Can walk. Looks ok what.

B: She can’t read. That’s a handicap.

I woke up early today to do my meditation which was disrupted by Alfred bringing me breakfast. I’m not complaining. Alfred getting me my food was a welcome change of routine. Back in India, I had to prepare my own breakfast.

India. It was only two days ago that I had said goodbye to my spiritual teacher for the last 4 years.

My mother had allowed me to go to India after the restless nights became unbearable for everyone. While at first it took only a physical toil on my mother and Alfred who would get up in the middle of the night to watch and worry over me as I tossed and turned on the bed, talking, shouting and wailing into the darkness, it weighed on them till it became an emotional burden. It was a burden that my mom couldn’t handle. She retreated further into her work, staying away from the house especially in the nights, away from the pain that was me. We drifted apart until there was a gulf so wide, that even Moses wouldn’t have been able to cross.

From the start, my ’sleep’ took more than a toil on my body. I would wake up in the morning feeling exhausted from a night of constant moving and talking, but the thing that really affected me was that I would start each day with this enormous sense of emptiness within, as if life had no meaning. I would go through the day feeling mentally drained, unable to concentrate on anything, often having to separate the images of my dreams and nightmares from my memories, sometimes even confused what was real from my past and made-belief with the images merging seamlessly.

Alfred tried recording what i spoke each night, but while I was speaking coherently in sentences, the conversations were disjointed and never seemed to make logical sense.

I started keeping a journal by my bed. Each time I drifted back into semi-consciousness, I would shake myself violently into consciousness and try to record down what i was last dreaming about. I tried to recreate the images in my mind before I lost them forever to my subconsciousness – together with Alfred’s faithful nightly recording, I tried to make sense of everything. It was a futile effort.

Somehow I could never remember clearly what I was dreaming about, the images I recreated and the voice recordings never seem to fit into a coherent narrative and there was always details missing from the images, causing them to be extremely fuzzy, as if the lens of my mind were never clean.

It wasn’t just the dreams and images that i was trying to record, i was also to record the events of my days. One thing that I regularly experience are dejavus. I would try to record every time I experienced a moment of dejavu.

My mom never gave up on me although she did try to avoid me. She would get the best doctors from around the world to come down to Singapore to check on me. They performed scans and tests but found nothing wrong with my brain. They couldn’t explain medically what was happening to me. My Mom then started sending me to see psychiatrists. I think with the amount of hours I spent on the sofas of those quacks, I personally kept the industry afloat. They tried to medicate me, tried to analyze me, but none of them every came close to explaining what was happening to me not to mention cure me. Even with the medication, I was still ‘enjoying’ my restless nights.

It came to the point that my mom broke down at the dinner table one night and started swearing, saying that what was happening to me was a curse for her previous good fortune. That the fates were making me pay for the blessing she got from God. She started swearing that it would have been better if I was not born. Although I was already 18 by then, I ran from the table crying.

Alfred found me weeping like a baby in the corner of my room that night. It was only then that I discovered the nature of my birth.

June 6th 2006 had been a day of great tragedy across the world. Typically, it would be the day that the Allied Nations from World War 2 would celebrate D-Day-the day that began the end of the war. On 2006, it became a day that the terrorists forever changed the world.

Sep 11 was a day that shook the world. It had threatened to change the way people live their lives, one constantly under fear. However, as the days after Sep 11 became weeks, and weeks became months, and months became years, even with the London, Madrid and Bali bombings, the grip of terrorism became to loosen, and people got on with their lives, acknowledging terrorism, but no longer fearing it, it becoming the crazy brother that the family never talked about, never cared about and who was never invited for anything.

June 6th was the day the crazy brother got dangerous, crashing the family annual gathering and killing everyone. The terrorists conducted simultaneous attack on almost every major city of the world. Cities like Washington, Tokyo, Beijing, and almost all the capital cities of the world experienced nuclear attacks. Singapore was spared the devastation of a nuclear attack but not the attack of the terrorists.

My parents were in San Francisco when the attacks were carried out. They survived the bomb that went off in San Francisco. However the doctors had then told my mom that the radiation from the fallout had damaged her womb and she would never have any children. Like Sarah in the bible who laughed when God told her she would have a child, she laughed when she was told she was pregnant 9 months later. I was her miracle, I was her Isaac.

After Alfred explained all that to me, I realized what she had meant when she said I was the child she should not had, and my condition was the price I was paying for her blessing.

When i was 19, I started deciding to find my own solution to the problem. The restless nights were getting worse, and this was a condition that I was not comfortable with to bring into adulthood. My dreams were getting more vivid and the emotions I was experiencing more intense. Each morning, I would be drained of energy and emotion, too tired to live my life. The only way then to solve the problem was to go for days without sleep, only collapsing out of exhaustion. That was not a tenable solution as after hours without sleep, I could not function properly.

I decided to find a solution and googled for it. His name didn’t come up in any of the first few results, but as I searched through the following pages, I found a name being mentioned in a lot of discussion forums. His name was Raj Kumar, and he was a spiritual teacher living somewhere in Southern India.

Apparently, Raj Kumar had been a top programmer for a major software company before June 6th. After that day, when he lost his whole family to the attacks, he suffered from a mental breakdown and became disillusioned with life. Like many people who survived that day, he retreated to the sanctuary that spirituality offered. Unlike most people, he stayed there and became a spiritual teacher.

The discussion forums were filled with posts by people who had visited him and through his teachings have achieved inner calm and peace. I was intrigued. I decided to travel to India to look for him. I told mother my intentions. As a woman devoted to science, she wasn’t very sure about the whole spirituality aspect of this solution but she was desperate to find a solution and allowed me to travel to India although she wasn’t convinced.

So, at 19, I traveled to India on my own to visit this teacher hoping he could change my life. When I was on the plane, I couldn’t help but daydream about how this Raj Kumar could become my own personal Yoda or Mr. Miyagi like in the old movies that Alfred would show me and help change my life.

And he did. Raj Kumar taught me meditation and many other things. Over the four years, I managed through the art of meditation to get physical and mental rest without actually going to sleep. And when I did sleep, I was able to be in control of my subconscious and view my dreams from the perspective of a third person with great clarity; that ability really helped in the accurate recording of my dreams. I stopped talking in my sleep and my body didn’t react to the dreams anymore; I was able to wake up each day without feeling drained.

In NUS, I took a module on networks where we learned about Border Gateway Protocol. Boring stuff. We learned the facts and how the whole system worked on a good day where everyone plays nice.

But we didn’t understand the protocol. At least I didn’t.

This article on Wired details another Internet Security flaw involving BGP.

I can’t say I understand BGP more than before but after reading the article I’m beginning to appreciate more what it really means to understand how something works.

I’m beginning to realize that things weren’t setup for us to question, to understand. I didn’t question, didn’t try to understand. I was contented with just knowing.

I guess that’s why I admire hackers. You can’t hack if you don’t understand. Knowing facts isn’t enough. Knowing isn’t enough. Period.

Here’s how it works. When a user types a website name into his browser or clicks “send” to launch an e-mail, a Domain Name System server produces an IP address for the destination. A router belonging to the user’s ISP then consults a BGP table for the best route. That table is built from announcements, or “advertisements,” issued by ISPs and other networks — also known as Autonomous Systems, or ASes — declaring the range of IP addresses, or IP prefixes, to which they’ll deliver traffic.

The routing table searches for the destination IP address among those prefixes. If two ASes deliver to the address, the one with the more specific prefix “wins” the traffic. For example, one AS may advertise that it delivers to a group of 90,000 IP addresses, while another delivers to a subset of 24,000 of those addresses. If the destination IP address falls within both announcements, BGP will send data to the narrower, more specific one.

To intercept data, an eavesdropper would advertise a range of IP addresses he wished to target that was narrower than the chunk advertised by other networks. The advertisement would take just minutes to propagate worldwide, before data headed to those addresses would begin arriving to his network.

The attack is called an IP hijack and, on its face, isn’t new.

But in the past, known IP hijacks have created outages, which, because they were so obvious, were quickly noticed and fixed. That’s what occurred earlier this year when Pakistan Telecom inadvertently hijacked YouTube traffic from around the world. The traffic hit a dead-end in Pakistan, so it was apparent to everyone trying to visit YouTube that something was amiss.

Pilosov’s innovation is to forward the intercepted data silently to the actual destination, so that no outage occurs.

Ordinarily, this shouldn’t work — the data would boomerang back to the eavesdropper. But Pilosov and Kapela use a method called AS path prepending that causes a select number of BGP routers to reject their deceptive advertisement. They then use these ASes to forward the stolen data to its rightful recipients.

A: May I ask why you are doing this?

B: Sure.

A: Why are you doing this?

B: You may ask but you may not know the answer.

Brian (aka litford) who is a mild mannered PR and social media practitioner by day and kick ass rocker by night (although the bassist rarely gets the pick of the chicks) has kindly made available the infectious (in a good way) song Some Girls from his band Leeson here. Previously available only on MySpace. Be warned, you may just be unable to get the tune out of your head.

I started watching the series Dexter over the last weekend. Lead investigator FBI agent Lundy taught me something – every serial killer has a pattern. Which is interesting considering there has been a spate of murders linked to Facebook.

Recently, there was a spate of murders where the victims were tertiary educated early 20s ladies. Investigators had been able to approximate the time of death for these victims when they realized the killer(s) was updating the Facebook status of the victims just after the murder.

For example, after Melody Chen was murdered, her status was updated to, “Melody is so dead…”. Her friends showed the customary concern by twittering, smsing and posting wall messages like, “hey babe, you ok? hang in there k, things will get better…..

“Funny he should say that, ” Detective A said about the wall message by John Lim, “considering that the killer strung her up from the ceiling fan with a rope around the neck and tried to make it look like she had committed suicide.”

Some other choice Facebook statuses:

“Celine is lying on her desk feeling like a knife has stabbed her in the back.”

“Christina is on her bed. She feels so suffocated.”

“Jamie is in great pain. She is dying inside.”

The two detectives while checking out the laptops found at the scenes realized a pattern. The murder victims were real Facebook junkies.

“Don’t these girls realize that they should set a password for their screen saver?” asked Detective B.

Which is so besides the point, considering they were dead. What the detectives did learn which was noteworthy was that the murdered victims all had two friends in common.

The suspects were narrowed down to a guy and a girl. Or so the detectives thought.

It turns out both suspects had rock solid alibis.

Damn.

Further investigations on the logs contributed by the Facebook admins led to the case breaking clue – there was a particular female user which had been heavily visiting the profile pages of the murdered friends of the female suspect.

The detectives and the Facebook admins decided to monitor her activities online. They noticed a sudden spike in this user’s viewing of the profile page of another friend.

“I think I smell a murder, ” says Detective A.

They laid a trap for the murder suspect using the potential victim as bait. They were right and apprehended the suspect just as she was about to slit the throat of the bait.

The trust of these ladies was so easy to gain. Everything about them is online on their Facebook page. I know their birthdays, their hobbies, their likes, their dislikes, the relationship statuses, their friends…

I’ve seen their photos. I know where they have been, who they hang out with. Gaining entry into their room, their homes was so easy. All I had to do was use Jane (the original female suspect) as a conversational starter.

Damn that Jane. I killed all these people cos of her. Friends she calls them. FRIENDS!

You know what are friends. Friends are people who have been there when your dad died. Someone who accompanied you for every single hospital visit. Someone who has bled with you, cried with you, laughed with you, experienced every fucking roller-coaster emotion with you and more. Friends are those who will be there with you.

Friends aren’t the people who cam-whore with you. Not the ones who just follow you because you’re showing your fucking cleavage in every single photo. Not the ones who post wall messages just to keep some fucking trivial tenuous connection with you.

Friends are the people your parents know. The ones you trust enough to open up your family to.

Friends…. I killed those girls because damn it, they are the kind of people that debase the meaning of friendship.

Everyone is a fucking friend now. What happened to the word ‘acquaintance’.

“She has a point, ” said Detective A to Detective B, “we’ve worked together for like 3 years and you haven’t even met my family. I don’t know a thing about you.”

“So what are you saying? We aren’t friends?”

“I’m saying you and your family is invited to dinner this Saturday, ” said Detective A.

An ad showing what happens if chemicals were human (via buzzfeed):

Plus what if fonts were human (from CollegeHumor):

I’m moving house in two month’s time. I’m almost confirmed going to go insane just packing the stuff that’s been accumulated over the course of my 27 years on this earth. I’m trying to use this period as a chance to let go. Throw away the stuff I don’t need, especially the stuff I don’t need emotionally. I’ve always been sentimental and it has always been hard to let go of stuff that bring back sweet sweet memories but now, it increasingly seems senseless to collect things or just have so many material possessions.

The above was the first windbreaker my dad bought me. I got it around the time I entered secondary one. The new school brought a whole new concept of an air-conditioned studying environment. Also, that was the first time school was more than just one street crossing away and it was to provide me some protection in case it rained on the way home.

I outgrew this windbreaker quite quickly. But it didn’t become useless. My dad started using it for his golf games. It got retired from active duty only recently when it became too worn out and too permanently stained. I don’t want to throw it away but a part of me knows it is pointless holding onto this artifact that links together so many phases of my life.

More than just being there in my life, the windbreaker represents all the qualities of my dad that makes him a good man – his frugality and the understated way he chooses to express his love for my sister and me.

Throwing this is like letting go that part of him i cherish, that part which I love. But maybe, just maybe, it is time to stop loving items and the memories but start loving again the person who is in the home.