All posts by Wan Kong Yew

What I’ve Been Up To (Part 1)…

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I’ve gotten my Streamyx service up and running, so hopefully I can be online more now. To start with, this is what I’ve been gaming with for the past month. Since I expected to be in Malaysia on holiday for only a month, I knew it wasn’t feasible to bring back my main gaming PC all the way from the Solomon Islands. So in order not to become bored silly while on holiday, I bought a PSP. As my wife will readily attest, I’ve been making noises about buying one ever since it launched, but the higher price and the limited games library available then didn’t make it seem like a good buy until now.

The really funny thing is that while I originally intended to buy the PSP to play “deep” games that I’ve heard so much about, such as Monster Hunter and Armored Core: Formula Front, I actually ended up spending most of my time on it on more arcade-style action games like God of War, Wipeout Pulse and Tekken: Dark Ressurection. I have to admit that between the handheld format and the clunky English translations (and the severe lack of them in many places) I just couldn’t summon up enough enthusiasm to really understand how the deeper games work.

Continue reading What I’ve Been Up To (Part 1)…

Out of a Job

As I anticipated, I’m now out of a job. To simplify a complicated situation, the company I was working for in the Solomon Islands has been experiencing financial difficulty for the past two years. More ominously, for the past two months, expatriate employees going back to Malaysia for their annual leave have not been receiving their full salary payment before being asked to return to work in the Solomon Islands.

As the person holding the title of Financial Controller in the company, though without much the power that the title holds since I’m not a relative of the big boss, unlike many of the other managers there, I have been keenly disturbed by this and worried that the powers-that-be have not been willing to take the harsh measures necessary to return the company to a profitable status. Even before I left the Solomon Islands, I insisted that I would refuse to work unless I was paid in full. After some nasty telephone calls, I have now been fully paid and also instructed that I won’t need to return to work.

Don’t feel too bad for me though, since my wife and I have been planning to leave the company after just one more year of working there anyway. This just means that we’ll need to readjust to life in Malaysia one year earlier with a bit less money than we’d planned. I’m planning to take things easy for a while. Now that I think about it,I’ve been working outside Malaysia for nearly 10 years now, and even that was after just a year of working in Malaysia after spending nearly 3 years in France. After all this time spent overseas, readjusting to life will take some doing. Not only will I need to look for a job, I’ll actually need to buy a car, learn how to drive in the hectic streets of Kuala Lumpur (very different from the leisurely pace in Honiara) and yes, even set up some sort of broadband connection where I’m staying. Just about everything here is new to me!

Once my net access is up and running, I should be able to work on updating this blog on a more regular basis, beginning with some fun stuff that I’ve been up to during the past month.

Hiatus

I am travelling to Malaysia on Thursday and currently expect to spend one month there. Since my Internet access during this time will likely be intermittent, I will most probably not be able to update this blog very often.

Local Houses in Solomon Islands

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My wife got me to drive one of the local maids employed in the compound where we live so that we could go take photos of some of the local houses. We’ve already visited this area previously but we didn’t take any photos then, and since there is a slight possibility that we might not be returning to the Solomon Islands after we go back to Malaysia on Thursday, my wife especially wanted some photos as a memento.

This particular house is where Helen, a maid who has worked for us for many years now is currently renting. She is currently building her own house nearby, basically just appropriating the land without any formal paperwork, buying the building materials and having her family members help out with the construction. It’s haphazard, unregulated and messy, but that’s how things work in the Solomon Islands. It also contributes to the tribal tensions here in Honiara. Honiara is located on Guadalcanal Island, while Helen and everyone else who stays in this area are from Malaita Island. Complaints from Guales about Malaitans taking over their land and their attempts to form a militia to drive out the Malaitans were what prompted the Malaitans to mount a coup-d’état in 2000.

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Recent Interesting Science Articles (Mar’08)

Four articles this month, one on the extremely exciting findings by the Cassini-Huygens mission to Enceladus, one on a somewhat weird life form found inside the remains of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor and finally two somewhat similar cases of emerging risks to people with medical conditions, one due to the use of implanted medical devices and the other due to exploits on Internet web browsers.

The Cassini-Hugens mission to Enceladus, the sixth largest of Saturn’s moons, not only confirmed the presence of liquid water beneath the icy surface of the moon, but also discovered, from a sampling of the brew vented out by a geyser the spacecraft flew past, that the moon is extraordinarily active and contains a surprising mix of organic chemicals. As the press release notes, heat, water vapour and organic compounds are the basic building blocks for life. As a science geek, I’m also impressed by the technical achievement of flying so close by a small moon at extremely high speeds, successfully intersecting a venting geyser without crashing on the moon with the whole thing carefully planned and coordinated on Earth.

Continue reading Recent Interesting Science Articles (Mar’08)

Fitna: Is Islam a Violent Religion?

So this video has been spreading around the Internet with astonishing speed. What really surprised me was when one of my housemates here in the Solomon Islands wanted to show me this video, even though I don’t think that she’s normally very politically conscious. I’d already read about it in Jed Yoong’s blog and had a bit of a spat over it there, so my post here is something of an elaboration of what I’ve already posted as comments over there.

First of all, I think that the short film is woefully amateurish. Collating video footage of the gory aftermath of terrorist attacks interweaved with quotations from the Quran and speeches by firebrand Islamist leaders does not a solid argument make. It’s a blatant attempt to arouse an emotional reaction in viewers instead of attempting to advance a reasoned argument and as such isn’t really worth watching at all.

Second, even if we were to take the central premise of the film seriously, the correct question isn’t whether or not Islam is a violent religion, it’s whether or not Islam is any more violent than the other great religions. Christianity makes for a good point of comparison. It’s shares the same fundamental roots as Islam, and yet is mostly accepted around the world as a peaceful, safe and moderate religion nowadays.

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A Game: Sins of a Solar Empire

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Getting to the top of the bestselling PC games list and beating out heavy hitters like Call of Duty 4 and World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade, even for a few short weeks, is a remarkable achievement for a niche title by an independent publisher without the benefit of a familiar brand name or a worldwide marketing campaign. Yet this was what Sins of a Solar Empire managed to do, and its success, which came as to surprise even to its publisher Stardock and its developer Ironclad, is proof that innovative games with relatively small budgets can still stand out even in a gaming market that is saturated by sequels of familiar franchises.

Unlike most of Stardock’s previous games and in spite of marketing blurbs calling Sins of a Solar Empire a 4X game, this is ultimately still a real-time strategy game, albeit a very slow one with many elements reminiscent of turn-based strategy games. Combined with a nifty interface and a design that emphasizes strategic level decision-making rather than the micromanagement of many other RTS games, it’s a pretty unique beast in the gaming market and deserves every bit of the success it has won.

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