Category Archives: Daily Scribble

My random thoughts of the day.

Daily Scribble

Respect

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There are many concept in our daily seems very simple, everyone suppose to knows what it means, but when you try to find a precise definition, you realize its meaning is actually very vague. Respect is one of such concepts. Many people respect means politeness, but that is not true. You can totally despite of someone yet be very polite to him. Many people thinks respect means agreeing, but that is also not true. You can pay respect to your opponent yet disagree everything he says. Respect is an altitude, it is inside the mind, it may or may not lead to certain external behaviors.

Respect requires an object to be respected, whether the object is a person, a organization or a religion. Is respect a property of the object or is it a result of something the object had done? I tends to believe in the later. Someone says we should respect elderly, teachers, authority, etc. I think no one deserved to be respect unless he earns it or he loses it. A good teacher, a gentle elderly, a just authority are respectable, but should we respect a bad teacher, a grumble old man, or a corrupted authority? Is it us who disrespect them or they disrespect themselves and their roles in the first place. Even when Kant says every men should be respected, his ground of respect is the rationality of men. Men is no longer respectable if he becomes irrational, on which he cease to be a man.

Instead of using a binary state of respect and disrespect, maybe we should measure respect using a scale. You don’t respect someone or despite of someone if you don’t know him, you are just neutral. The more you know about someone, the more you can tell whether he is respectable or not and you can adjust your level of respect towards him accordingly. You can also slice respect into smaller units according to his relationship with you. Someone maybe a very respectable father to his children, but at the same time he may be a very lousy teacher whom deserve no respect from his students.

Daily Scribble

What’s wrong with the undergrad mentality

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Today is the last day of my philosophy class. The professor has office hour after the lecture. I don’t know which essay topic should I choose, so I went to see her. There is a small line up in front of her office. Some students want to check the grades of their exam, some other just like me want to discuss their essay. While waiting in line, I start the conversation with the classmates by asking them how do they think about the course. To my surprise, all three of them think the course is really hard. They did not get a good grade in the exam and not even know how to write a philosophy paper.

I chat with them a little bit more, I found out none of them are philosophy major. They take the course not because they are interested in political philosophy, it is because this course fulfill the requirement for a minor degree or is an elective of a certain a program. To them, this course is just another course, the final essay is one of the many essays due next week. The stop keeping up with reading after the exam, since the material in those chapters won’t get them any grades. They are very surprise when I told them I am taking this course for fun. I guess they wouldn’t believe why someone would eager to take a course that they think is a torture.

I remember I had the same mentality when I was in undergrad. A course is just a mean for an end, an obstacle between myself and graduation. I don’t really care what I learn, all I care about was getting good grade and an honor degree. I wonder does all undergrad think the same way. Students go to university suppose to learn enthusiastically and always aspire for higher knowledge. How come university becomes a system making students to jump throw hoops in order to graduate. It seems that is not the problem of university. I took the same philosophy course as the other undergrad students. I found the course very interesting but the undergrad think it is boring. If nothing is wrong with the university, then something must be wrong with the undergrad students. But what’s wrong with them? I was one of them too!

Daily Scribble

Indian bonding

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The visiting VP is taking the team out for dinner tonight, thank us for the hard work during the project. Business with your boss, your boss’ boss and your boss’ boss’ boss is usually timid and boring, you can’t talking freely as you are with your own friends. The topic of conversation is kinda general and vague in the beginning, we carefully talk things related to the project. We bashed the IT department, circulate anecdotes about our customers, while trying not to complaining too bluntly about the poor management of the project. Somehow the conversation slowly shift to our Indian experience. All but one colleague at the table went to the Bangalore tour of duty. The VP started with his Indian experience and we all have funny stories to share.

There are some common theme in our Indian experience. After we come back to Canada, we really appreciate the clean air and quiet living that we take for granted. We all wonder whether the highway between the guest house and the Bangalore office is still under construction. We have many stories of the India super inefficient labor intensive way of task management. Anything that we use computer or machine to automate, they use extensive man power in India. Construction workers chip gravel from a big rock with sledge hammer instead of power tools. The page number of engineering lab book is hand stamped instead of machine printed. The Indian experience connects everyone and light up the atmosphere as we recall how our trip to India. Usually you would want to end this kind of business dinner as soon as possible, but we sat at the restaurant, chatted and laughed for almost an hour after the dinner.

Daily Scribble

How to display Chinese mp3 tag in iPhone

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Pat got a new iPhone, so it is my job to load it up with mp3. When I import my Chinese mp3 into iTune, the mp3 tag of some songs are displayed as funny characters. The iPod song list in iPhone suffers the same problem. It is very inconvenient if you don’t know what singer and song you are listening. The best you can do is trying to guess the song from the album art and track number. My friends who has an iPhone and copy mp3 from me also has the same problem. It seems they simply rename the mp3 tag manually or tolerate the occasion corrupted song name.

After praying to the Google God, asking it to help me solve the problem, I got an answer. The cause of the problem is that the mp3 use big5 or GB code in the mp3 tag, which is incompatible with the Unicode used in iTune and iPhone. The solution is pretty straight forward, all I need to do is to translate the characters inside the mp3 tag to Unicode using Convertz 8.02. The interface of the program looks a bit dated (or should I say it is ugly?), but it get the job done. I have to pre-process the mp3 files before I import them to iTune. The two steps process is a bit inconvenient, but better than no knowing what song is playing. Why don’t iTune have a built-in mp3 tag code convention feature?

Daily Scribble

The two extreme of children

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I read two news article about children today. One talks about children in Canada, the other talks about children in India. One talks about the problem of having too much, the other talks about the problem of having next to nothing. The article on Globe and Mail is about Why are children starving in a booming India?. The article on National Post is about The Perfect Child. It is quite unsettling to read the extreme contrast to the fate of children in two places.

The problem for Canadian parent is how to raise a perfect children. The dilemma is having the life of the child too well planned so he cannot learn from trail and error or his own mistake. On the other side of the world, the Indian children are struggling to stay alive. Children malnutrition in India is twice worse than in Africa and five times worse than in China. The problem of teaching children to read and write in China seems like a piece of cake.

The news presents a typical poor Indian family with malnourished child. The dad in the family makes merely US$5 a month, but he spent half of what he earn in cigarette instead of buying food for the children. The family income cannot support a big family but they are having six children. Babies are not breastfeed once he is born, the mother ask the astrologer to pick an auspicious day to start breastfeeding, sometimes the baby is not fed for days or even weeks. Foreign aids agency wants to provide vitamin pills to the poor children, but the Hindu fundamentalist protest the capsule is made of gelatin, a product made of cows.

I feel sorry for the children in India, but their misfortune cannot blame anyone but their own stupid culture. If a culture don’t treasure their next generation, this culture has no future. If a culture treasure cows more than the life of their children, this culture should simply go extinct. It can go extinct naturally with its population die slowly and painfully. Alteratively we can help the culture extinct sooner and better by liberating its people. We should help them move on to a more enlightened culture, even we have to force the liberation. People with a stupid culture has no rights to cling on their culture.