My Streamyx connection was strangely intermittent (DSL light keeps blinking) a few days ago, then one night it just decided to quit. I thought it was “normal”, since Swordie mentioned that the guys at TM are doing an upgrade for a whopping 8 days starting 2nd October. However, checking further it seems that that only affects users in Cheras. And that announcement is only available for viewing in google cache, and not TMNet’s actual website - but that’s another story lah.

Back to the my problem, the connection was still KO the next day, but I was thinking this would be a good time to take a holiday from the Net at least for a night (read: rediscover what it’s like to sleep a full 8 hours), so I didn’t bother calling 1300889515 just yet.

Anyway I thought the problem might be in the splitter or the RJ-11 socket of the square thingy where the indoor phone line terminates (what do you actually call this thing?), because voice was not OK if I connect to the splitter and OK if connect direct; and for both, Streamyx’s dead. And I’ve been using the splitter for at least 3 years, and the RJ-11 socket for about 10: the pins looked a bit rusty.

Then early this evening, looking closer at the RJ-11 socket’s pins, I noticed one of them a little out of alignment. So, simply using a small slotted screwdriver I lifted up the stray pin into alignment, and voila!

Therefore, I was wondering, if I *did* call Streamyx support, how many round trips of “makan angin” would be in store for me? Because, reading thru quite a few newspaper hotline letters, forum threads and blog entries on grouses with Streamyx support, I have never read this simple solution being suggested.

Have you?

I received the following email about 2 weeks back:

From: “Irene Julia” <irene.julia@gmail.com>
To: [deleted]

Sent: Wednesday, June 13, 2007 1:54 AM
Subject: Fwd: Free PDA+GSM Palm

Dear Friends,

Here is to announce that our company Palm, Inc., headquarter is located in Sunnyvale, California US opens our marketing office in Kuala Lumpur for Asia region. We are promoting our product and for the detail you can visit: 

http://www.palm.com/id/products/smartphones/

For first launching of our product in Malaysia, we will give away for free the new product of PDA+GSM Palm Type Treo 650 and Treo 680 and Treo 750.

By giving the product of PDA+GSM , we will get valuable feed back from the customers and get the mouth to mouth advertising.

You only have to forward to 15 people. After 2 weeks you will receive a PDA+GSM Palm Type Treo 650. If you forward to 25 people, you will receive a PDA+GSM Handspring Type Treo 680. And if you forward to 40 people you will get a PDA+GSM Palm Type Treo 750.

The only thing to remember is to send cc (copy) to:

louise.jasmine@gmail.com

Only by sending email to this address, we know you have forwarded this massage to your friends.

Good Luck!!

Louise Jasmine

Executive Promotion

Kuala Lumpur Office

Palm, Inc.

Email:

Private : louise.jasmine@gmail.com
Business: louise.jasmine@palm.com

After explaining to the sender that it’s most likely a hoax, I keep getting the same email back from different persons.

Even though I can’t find references to it the usual way, it still sounds suspicious for the following reasons:

• why she used a free email account to send this instead of palm.com corporate email?
• why is the email sent by a Ms Irene Julia, while it was signed by a Ms Louise Jasmine?
• why she linked to Palm’s Indonesian website instead of Palm’s Malaysian website?
• neither Palm US, nor Palm Indonesia, nor Palm Malaysia website mentioned any such promotion/marketing campaign.
• spelling and grammatical errors

I contacted Palm Corp US, Hong Kong and Singapore to confirm whether this is an authentic offer via their listed email address a few weeks ago, unfortunately I haven’t received any reply yet. Email addresses for Palm Malaysia & Indonesia are not listed.

It came and went - time seemed to slow down in the first few weeks of my stay at INTAN Bukit Kiara, then speeded up dramatically towards the end of April.

The exams went well - especially the first (stats) and last (research methods). I thought I didn’t do the second (SPSS) too well, even though I expected it to be easy. Lesson learnt: be overconfident at your peril!

And now, at the time of writing, it’s been 10 days since I came back on the 12th May.

———————————-

Regarding the statistics exam - was held 16th April. We had to do 5 questions out of 8 in 3 hours. I ended up doing 7, because (i) I finished 5 questions with 45 minutes to spare; (ii) the last 2 questions was much easier than the first 5, and (iii) the examiners would select the best 5 anyway.

The 2-week crash course in statistics has certainly been eye-opening and quite stressful. It has not been unusual for me to review the day’s lecture till late at night. Everything was done at full speed ahead. For example, the ANOVA (>=3 mean test) part usually takes one whole semester, but in this course it was covered in a day. Every day is a different topic - you had to make sure you fully understood the day’s topic, for tomorrow is a different topic altogether.

The biggest problem is deciding which hypothesis testing approach to use in what situation. Even though the exam is open book, it definitely won’t be easy.

Another is that it’s quite easy to get lost in the long formulas. One wrong step, and you get the whole question wrong.

For example, the formula to work out the t value in hypothesis testing using regression looks like this:

One mistake on the scientific calculator or even Excel on the laptop, and you’ve had it.

One could use SPSS, but there’s no time to get well-versed enough with it. Plus, I think it’s good to know the fundamentals too, rather than simply keying the data.

Adding to the stress is that the statistics module contributes the most i.e. 45% to the whole course.

If we don’t pass the course, automatically the scholarship offer will be withdrawn. Of course, judging from past history, most people would pass, but nobody want to be added to the statistic of people who’ve failed.

This was what happened to me middle of last year. Click on the thumbnail below to see bigger picture.

Update post exam, 26th April:

We had to answer 5 questions (no options) in 2 hours. First impressions: this is going to be much easier than the stats exam. But surprisingly, I found myself running out of time, and actually failed to find the time to answer a part of one question, and not quite 100% sure of my answers to some others. I think this is the price I paid for being too overconfident. However, I am confident of at least passing it. A few colleagues remarked that they’ve scored full marks on both stats and SPSS exams, hence they’ve got  at least 65% of the QA course marks in the bag, meaning they can skip the research methods module altogether!

—————————————————–

For this module, there are 300 slides to go through in 5 days.

By the end of the 2nd day, we were already at the 178th slide. I must add here that it’s rather embarrassing to the lecturer and INTAN in general regarding the state of the computers in the huge lab. The PC she used popped up a window every few minutes with the big bright words: “Warning, infected with virus”. Quite a few of the computers are infected with malware, and some did not function at all. At least one had a problematic SPSS installation - it would quit without warning. It was so bad that she had to declare that the exam would be paper based instead of computer based. And the INTAN director’s office is just a short walk down the block!

Back to the module. My initial thought was that this module was going to be easy - all computer based - let it do all the number crunching - but as we went on, there are actually so many new things to be learnt with regards to arcane statistical concepts. We didn’t actually go through the background of the names, there was simply no time for that as the lecturer zoomed through the slides like there’s no tomorrow.

For example, in checking on the responses to your questionnaires for your research, you’d have to ensure that it has what’s called reliability of scales, meaning the scales you use consistently measures whatever it’s supposed to measure. Scales in this case can be of the form: 1-strongly disagree, 2-disagree,…, 6-agree, 7-strongly agree. For that, you’d have to first compute the “Cronbach Alpha”. If its value is more than 0.6, then you can rest assured that your questionnaire is OK.

But if not, you’d have to fix it by doing the next step called the “Factor Analysis”, where you’d select the “Rotation method: Varimax with Kaiser Normalization”. Then you’d display the “Scree plot” and extract “Eigenvalues” that’s over the value of 1.

We’d encounter dialog boxes like this

The resulting scree plot

Another crazy dialog box

Hair-tearing stuff indeed, especially when it’s a hot afternoon in a room containing more than 70 computers with less than adequate airconditioning.

Apart from the Scree plot (chart), I also encountered at least 3 other charts which I would never have imagined the usefulness of had I not embarked on this course. They are the mysteriously named “stem & leaf plot”, “box plot” and “Q-Q plot”.

A box plot

A Q-Q plot

I also encountered colourful sentences in the notes like the following: “Need to test formally using Kolmogorov-Smirnov or Shapiro-Wilk statistics to check for departure from normality.” No need for that, we’re confirmed to be way departed from normality…

And we have not even started on hypothesis testing yet. That should cause us to let off more steam from our heads.

The exam is next Tuesday.

According to Dr Razak Dali, 4th April 2007.

1. MEETING (mesyuarat)
perjumpaan/pertemuan oleh sesuatu badan/persatuan/kumpulan yang terdekat dengan tujuan menyelesaikan beberapa masalah melalui proses perbincangan, dua jenis mesyuarat iaitu:

• taklimat (satu hala sahaja); dan
• mesyuarat jawatankuasa (dua hala) untuk menyelesaikan masalah, mesti ada agenda yang disusun dan perbincangan diadakan secara tersusun dan bertatacara serta dipengerusikan oleh seorang pengerusi mesyuarat, ahli mesyuarat dilantik dan boleh bersuara/memberi pendapat, kehadiran tidak bebas iaitu harus dijemput sama ada sebagai ahli mesyuarat ataupun pemerhati (pemerhati ataupun wakil tidak boleh secara bebas memberi pandangan ataupun memberi cadangan sebab mesti mendapat persetujuan ketua jabatan sebelum dibenarkan membuat sesuatu keputusan yang melibatkan jabatannya)

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According to Dr Razak Dali, 4th April 2007.

Jika hari ini adalah hari Jumaat,

kelmarin dahulu = day before yesterday = Rabu

kelmarin = yesterday = Khamis

semalam = last night. Ertinya, “semalam” bukan bermaksud “yesterday”, seperti yang disangka oleh ramai orang.

hari ini = today = Jumaat

esok = tomorrow = Sabtu

lusa = day after tomorrow = Ahad

tulat = two days after tomorrow = Isnin

tonggeng = tubin = three days after tomorrow = Selasa

Useful, and sometimes eye-opening language tips:

Comprehension - kefahaman maksud yang tersurat

Understanding - pengertian maksud yang tersirat

Do not explain something using examples. Examples should only be give in support of the explanation.

Do not gesture with your hands when explaining, otherwise the explanation will come out of your body language instead of your brain.

Visi - nampak (mata) - peringkat falsafah

Misi - perlakuan - what to do / strategy

ialah - mesti diikuti dengan nombor atau kata nama. Kadangkala tidak perlu digunakan langsung.

Contoh:

• Saya isteri Dr Razak. (betul)
• Saya ialah isteri Dr Razak. (betul)

adalah - mesti diikuti oleh sebuah kata sifat atau sebagai penghubung.

Contoh:

• Hadiah ini adalah untuk tetamu. (betul)
• Saya adalah gemuk. (betul)
• Saya ialah gemuk. (salah)

Tidak boleh memulakan ayat dengan “adalah”. Contoh: Adalah saya dengan hormatnya merujuk kepada perkara di atas. (salah)

Gunapakai - X

Tadbirurus - ok

Kuat kuasa - ok

Kuatkuasa - X

Menguatkuasakan - ok

Penguat kuasa - ok

antidadah - ok

anti-Mahathir - ok

se-Malaysia - ok

senggara = selenggara

perlantikan - X

pelantikan - ok

Yang Dipertua - ok

Yang di-Pertuan Agong - ok

berbahaya - ok

merbahaya - X

petender - ok

penender - X

mencintai - ok

menyintai - X

oleh kerana - X

oleh sebab - ok

15 Jalan Mat Salleh - ok

15, Jalan Mat Salleh - X

When listing options, the following is correct:

a. xxxxxxxxx

b. xxxxxxxxx

c. xxxxxxxxx

When listing options, the following is incorrect:
(a) xxxxxxxxx

(b) xxxxxxxxx

(c) xxxxxxxxx

Lampiran 1 - X, because we want to differentiate from the page number format, which uses the same Arabic number

Lampiran I - ok

Lampiran A - ok

Lampiran A1 - ok

Lampiran IA - ok

Tanda bacaan

Tanda titik (.), tanda soal (?), dan tanda seru (!) sama konsepnya iaitu untuk menutup ayat, selepas tanda ini mesti guna huruf besar.

( ) parentheses/kurungan [bulat] (parentesis) - NOT “brackets”!

[ ] bracket/kurungan siku - NOT “square brackets”!

{ } braces/curly bracket/kurungan dakap

([ ]) dibenarkan dalam penulisan (((([ ]))))

contoh:
Kita daripada pelbagai kaum di Malaysia (Cina, Melayu, India, suku kaum di Sabah (Kadazandusun, Bajau, Murut, dll.) dan suku kaum di Sarawak (Dayak [Iban, Bidayuh], Melanau, dll.)) haruslah hidup dalam suasana aman. Read the rest of this entry »

These 2 days were spent with Dr Razak Dali, DEd, 62 who’s still the only Malaysian holding a doctorate in reading. Together with his wife, Sharifah Tan Sri Syed Hassan Aidid, they are language consultants to Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (DBP), public institutions of higher learning and other bodies.We went through the nitty-gritties of academic reading and writing. His teaching style is as irreverent as Zainal’s, but surely with more class. He’s very frank: he said he’s being paid RM400 per hour by INTAN for his services. Hmm… that means about RM6,000 for 2 days’ work. Not bad at all.

It was truly a privilege to spend time with such giants in the national language.

Here are some of the things he said:

• There’s no such thing as a bad book - you dont understand what the author is saying because you dont have prior knowledge of the subject matter. Reading is only effective if information being read can be tied to information that already exists inside the reader’s brain.
• there is no such thing as speed reading - it’s merely a gimmick. You can only read fast (and benefit from it) if you are reading materials which topic is your field of expertise.
• A graduate student should spend their working hours (assuming they’re doing it fulltime): 60% reading, 30% writing, 10% talking (discussion). Reference should be only 30% books (usually based on 10 years’. The majority should be from journals due to its leading-edge nature.

He gave many language tips - he encouraged us to spread them around - they include the following:

Perbezaan antara “sungguhpun” dengan “walaupun/kendatipun/jika”

Sungguhpun – digunakan pada situasi yang sebenarnya berlaku/wujud/nyata.

Walaupun – digunakan pada situasi yang tidak benar/belum berlaku/tidak mungkin berlaku, seerti dengan kendatipun, kalaupun. Contoh ayat: Walaupun hidup seribu tahun kalau tidak sembahyang tiada gunanya.
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