Some light humour

This joke is contributed by Dexter:

Once a while visiting a very rich friend, the maid approached me and.....

Question : "What would you like to have ..Fruit juice, Soda, Tea,Chocolate, Capuccino, Frapuccino,or Coffee?"
Answer: " Tea please"

Question : " Ceylon tea, Indian tea, Herbal tea, Bush tea, Honey bush tea, iced tea or green tea ?"
Answer : "Ceylon tea "

Question : "How would you like it ? black or white ?
Answer: "white"

Question: "Milk, or fresh cream?
Answer: "With milk "

Question: "Goat's milk, or cow's milk"
Answer: "With cow's milk please.

Question: " Freezeland cow or Afrikaner cow?"
Answer: " Um, I'll just take it black. "

Question: " Would you like it with sweetener, sugar or honey?"
Answer: "With sugar"

Question: " Beet sugar or cane sugar?"
Answer: "Cane sugar "

Question:" White, brown or yellow sugar?"

Answer: "Forget about the tea, just give me a glass of water instead."

Question: "Mineral water, tap water or distilled water? "
Answer: "Mineral water"

Question: "Flavored or non-flavored ?"
Answer: "I think I'll just die of thirst.......".

Start Of Exam

Today's first paper started and ended.

Thanks to Professor Stroud who told us which topics will be tested in the questions, and thus we could focus on studying the topics.

The topics are:

1) Implicational Scale
2) Pidgins and Creoles
3) New Englishes.

No Pic No Talk

Some pictures taken from Hardwarezone forum. The topic is "No Pic No Talk".





























































More at : http://forums.hardwarezone.com/showthread.php?t=1149679&page=1&pp=15

Civil Unrest In France

Picture from BBC.

There is a civil unrest that has been triggered in France on 27 Oct 2005 when policemen who wanted to conduct immigration ID checks on some high school teenagers playing football in the Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois. The teenagers, fearing that they were been chased by the policemen, and wanting to prevent getting into police custody for a long time for the checking of identities and having to involve their parents to bail them out after the incident, ran and hid in nearby places. Three teenagers who climbed a wall to hide in a power substation - two of them were electrocuted and 1 was injured and hospitalised.

This event ignited pre-existing tensions and led to the widespread suburban civil unrests. I read in today's Straits Times and article in the Review section. It talks about the existing state of immigration assimilation policies in France and also encompasses the whole of Europe, which differs from that of other immigrant countries like America, Canada, Singapore which have an existing policy to assimilate immigrants into society to absorb them to contribute economically to the nation - providing them with jobs, incentives for working in the countries, proper housing facilities and various other policies to promote foreign immigrants' assimilation into their society. In contrast, France and Europe, do not have this policy of assimilation. They can give citizenships to the foreign immigrants, but no process of integrating a national identity or more importantly, a sense of belonging a place to the immigrants. They do not ensure that most immigrants have economic stability, providing them with the proper job opportunities in France in order to quell the pre-existing tensions and thus this civil unrest has erupted. This can be seen from the fact that most of the civil unrest demonstrators are belonging to the poor suburban neighbourhoods of the country, who do not have a proper economic stability status and hence feel that they have been excluded from the nation (and thus no proper assimilation has occurred/no sense of belonging to the nation developed.) The demonstrators strike out and damage those facilities such as school institutions, and those other public institutional buildings, as a result of the ill-feelings that have developed because they felt that these institutions have not enabled them to have a good economic status in the country and have excluded them from developing in the country. Also, residents have reported racial and discrimination in those suburbs. Unlike Singapore, France do not practise some policies of racial cohesiveness throughout the social fabric of the nation. Singapore has promoted the social cohesiveness of all races from the time the nation is born, such as through the housing planning schemes, whereby there is a kind of fixed quota of housing where a housing board must have certain munber of mixed races living together, and this may develop to a kind of understanding between races which may lead to their racial harmony. Singapore has also promoted racial cohesiveness in education - such that national education curriculum has included the inculcation of values of racial cohesivess as a compulsory subject. Finally, the most recent event of the bloggers being charged for writing out seditious remarks in their blogs by the government. This has shown us that Singapore government is very strict on the issue of racial cohesiveness in Singapore. Although this key elements of policies are relevant to be implemented in Singapore, it may not be inappropriate to be applied in France due to the different social background and development and history of the two nations. In effect, the French government has implemented curfews to quell the civil unrest.

The last sentence of the Straits Times article states that besides the uneven geographical differences between rich and poor nations, the next geographical difference would be the difference between the rich people and people who are not assimilated/excluded from the system in the nation. This process of difficulty of assimilation of immigrants occurs not only in Europe but also in all western countries.

Splogs

Splogs or spamming of advertisments in weblogs have become rather prevalent in this time of popularity of blogs. Spams used to dominate in other areas of the internet such as email spam, forum spam, etc. The rise of the popularity of weblogs have caused spams to shift their focus onto weblogs. Thus coining of the new computer term: splog.

Here is the definition from Wikpedia:

Spam blogs, sometimes referred to by the neologism splogs, are Web Log (or "blog") sites which the author uses only for promoting affiliated websites. The purpose is to increase the PageRank of the affiliated sites, get ad impressions from visitors, and/or use the blog as a link outlet to get new sites indexed. Content is often nonsense or text stolen from other websites with an unusually high number of links to sites associated with the splog creator which are often disreputable or otherwise useless Web sites.

Splogs have become a major problem on free blog hosts such as Google's Blogspot service. These fake blogs waste valuable disk space and bandwidth as well as pollute search engine results.

The term splog was popularized around mid August 2005 when it was first used by Mark Cuban, but appears to have been used a few times before for describing spam blogs going back to at least 2003.

Several splog reporting services have been created for good willed users to report splog with plans of offering these splog URLs to search engines so that they can be excluded from search results. Splog Reporter was the first service of this kind.

There is frequent confusion between the terms "Splog" and "Link spam". "Splogs" are blogs where actual articles are spam, whereas "Link Spam" refers to only spam in the comments of a blog article. "Splog" does not include random comments on the blogs of innocent bystanders, that is "Link spam" or "comment spam". "Link spam" takes advantage of a site's ability to allow visitors to post links. A blog that posts its own spam is a form of Spamdexing that is now called a Splog.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splog

Updated links of splogs:

http://splogspot.com/recent

WTF(What the Fuss!!) After I got back a project for a module, I found that I got a very low grade for it.

Important Lessons for doing projects:

1) Never underestimate the easiness of a project, no matter how easy you think that project may look to you on the surface.

2) Try to get someone to vet over your project after you have finished writing it because we can always miss out the errors that we make ourselves because it is our own writing and we tend to miss these kinds of errors.

S.H.E 8TH Album "Don't Wanna Grow Up"

This is one of the photos for S.H.E's 8TH album which is stated to be release on 25 Nov 2005.

In this album, they are dressed up as dolls which is the main theme for their promotion of this album.

Their 2005 Taiwan Drama Serial titled Reaching For the Stars is their latest drama project and may be airing in Singapore by end November.