I wanted to commit substantial time doing up my personal project, ERPZ this Chinese New Year but then time turned out to be spent on a couple of other matters that is legitimately supposed to bug me anyways. First there’s visiting, something inevitable and besides, it’s a must if you want to increase your income for the month (for those unmarrieds). Visits are usually quite a long affair for a person like me surrounded by the others from my family. Typically I enjoy talking to people, finding out more from others while talking about how I’m doing. This year, because I don’t see that much of my cousins, uncles and aunties, chats and conversations have been severally reduced already.
Then hanging out with the family. Being in camp for pretty long means that besides not getting to go out with friends, the family is neglected. So to make it up we go shopping, movies, dine out and stuff like that. My family is kinda modern in that sense; very outgoing, (almost) always shopping in town, checking out new places to hang out, have meals and stuff like that. In other sense, we are traditional in that we sit together to catch a show on TV and we also have home cook meals together quite often (not this New Year period though, Mum says she needs to rest, which explains the dining out these days). I must say the physical actions are very much the same when I am out with friends and with parents, very very much the same.
Then I have my personal kind of stuff. I just got a bike a week before Chinese New Year and I went riding around, exploring park connectors near my place and just today I went to experiment with pumping my bike tyres with the air pump at the petrol kiosk. Lucky for me, Jenson replied my SMS promptly to give me an idea how to operate the pump. I think I should have played around with it a bit more – shall try again next time. I hate the beeping sounds the pump makes when you adjust the pressure and all that though – it’s pretty loud and irritating. Besides that I was hunting for books (which I know I wouldn’t really have time to finish though I very much yearn to read them). I’m on a reading campaign to finish a couple of management, leadership, investment and business sort of books. That kind of explains the slowdown in writing on ERPZ.
On other matters, I am exploring Search Engine Optimization for EduDelta. I’ve submitted to Google, gave them my sitemap and all that just to ensure the page rank climbs. Regular updating helps, my friend Gerald advises. Oh for those interested in Web Design or need helps, do drop by his site for a visit. He’s got his ‘fusedthought‘ domain name finally and he was quite happy over it the last couple of weeks, haha. I’m not sure if any of the EduDelta workmates follow my blog but if you’re one of them, I need you guys to link your blogs to our promotion site just to increase the links (though I won’t assume them to be high quality ones, hehe). Lots of links are good for page rank, especially links from sites, which themselves are highly linked. It’s a network connections principle; it’s related to graph theory but I shan’t dwell further. I’ll probably be reading more on SEO as soon as I complete the books I have unread right now – that’s probably a month’s time. I hope it’ll be sooner though.
I’ve been rather busy with the computer at home, mainly working on EduDelta matters but also on my new personal project. After cleaning up Kwang Guan’s formatting problem with the proposal, revamping our project website and adding more content about our project on the website, I must say I’ve become rather versed with matters of publicity and image management for a project/organization/team. Of course, it has been fun and this is really the time when I realised what sort of organization I want to be working in. I would enjoy lots of informality, innovation, a strong willingness to explore the unknown and untried in a workplace.
The other thing I’ve been working on is something I had always wanted to do – develop the main erpz.net site. I’ve been trying all these years since its founding in 2004 but I don’t have very concrete ideas that I can sustain my energy working on. Originally I had the idea to make it a blog with false content, then a site for political discussion but they all failed. Erpz.net stayed as ‘Work In Progress’ for close to 1.5 years until a couple of days ago when it struck me that so many people around me have been trying to improve themselves by working hard through education. With EduDelta, we try and solve a cost and resource problem for kids from poor families without access to quality tuition that provides secondary support to their school work. Somehow there’s another set of tools missing from the picture. For those poor kids who are doing well in school, what they lack is not secondary education support but some information on college application, scholarship avenues and access to methods of handling resource-intensive projects that are now part of school assessment. At the same time I know of intelligent students who could have done well in school if not for their poor thinking habits and wrong attitude towards learning. I want to correct all that problems.
And that’s why I’m starting ERPZ. It’s going to revolutionize our thinking about education. Too often we have been focused on the hard stuff but with the rise of project assessment, an attempt to match skills learnt in school to the ones used at work, a new means of handling learning and education is needed. We need to learn the attitudes to adopt, the mindsets to take on and the techniques of handling the myriad of new assessments concocted by schools these days. Propagating these ideas through giving tuition would be too slow. Secondary, Junior College and University students should be mature enough to find out the right way to get things done by themselves and I’m giving them extra help.
I hate treadmills. I dread trying to run in the gym although I love running. Once I tried to train myself on the treadmill and I thought it’ll be a good tool to help me build my stamina but somehow I never seem to be able to maximize my potential on a treadmill, I didn’t find the things I liked about running when I run on the treadmill. It’s not that I don’t get a decent timing on the treadmill for long distance or matters to do with performance, it was just the experience. I didn’t feel the wind gushing at me on it, nor the weird feeling of my legs being detached from my upper body, the feeling of just being carried around by the power of that 2 limbs. Treading on the belt also sucks, I feel as though I’m propelled by the belt rather than my legs, and the perfect flatness of the belt I tread on made the run dull (not to mention the constant ‘scenery’ around me). It is as though I was driven by fear – I didn’t feel free on the treadmill.
I kept having this feeling that somehow I’ve always been like that; it’s like I’ve hated the treadmill a very long time ago, perhaps even before it existed. There are features of human inventions that I hated and this is one thing where I hated thoroughly. Yet I’ve been trusting, I always thought that though I hate it, hating the feeling of it is different from what it does to me. I believed that it really could help me improve my stamina, that with training on it, I’ll be strong, a better runner. Today, I’m still not sure if that is true.
It is something else that I discovered today. I realised that the treadmill is like a controlled environment, very much like the education system, within some bureaucracy or big firm. It functions, but it spins with consistency, monotony and it trains people to abide by it in a very narrow sense. It’s like taking examinations, where you study hard, learn the topics that are taught, scoring well, getting certificates and finding a good job. Running outside, to me, is the very opposite of that; it’s about controlling the environment rather than allow yourself to be pushed, propelled by a lifeless piece of thing. It allows you to learn how to handle the steep up and down slopes, the sharp turns; it forces you to think about the coordination of your pacing and your breathing, subjected to the terrain and finally, it trains you to feel the perspiration on your skin flowing, the heat of your body radiating outwards without the cool air-conditioning in the gym trying to disturb your body’s homeostasis. All that, is comparable to learning from being in society, to interacting with different sort of people under different circumstances, to pick yourself up from failure by attempting alternatives, to approach the right people to get the appropriate help, to find the best place to enjoy a cup of tea, to do business and build an empire – in essence, to live life.
Perhaps that’s too big a comparison to make, treadmills and running in the open with life in a system and life in society. The treadmill is an extreme case of the lack of freedom while in a system, there’s still more hint of intelligence than plain running non-stop on something that tricks you into attempting to move forward but all the while pushing you back. Or perhaps it’s just the subconscious knowledge that you will never be able to ‘catch up’ with the belt (unless you decide to put some slow speed and try to run ‘across’ the console panel) that is taking the fun out of the run. I’ve no idea. But like the treadmill I’ve always believed in systems being able to prepare me for the real world out there and I really pray that it does because I’ll be out there soon, very soon.
