Whee! An excuse to stay immature!

Article from Discovery about how formal education is keeping our minds in a state of flexible receptivity.

I can't help making fun of poor English

I had this long post typed out about the clips below but I deleted it. Nothing I type can do justice to them. If you can watch this and not laugh you need a lobotomy. Trolled them all for you.

In context

More useful phrases!

And in context...

... my jaw was aching after this one.

Boys too!

The guys in context (the term can only be used extremely loosely here)

This guy tells the truth.

Some information about the show.
Original network website here, which betrays the fact that this series spawned 12 episodes. This only reinforces my belief that the Japanese are the most perverse people in the world.

I'm gonna ask my Japanese colleague if she's ever seen it and if she can get me any more copies of the show. And I'm asking what "Jaa, sonna wakede" means.

Working with Alex

Some simple rules for working with people from IT Support:

1. If I tell you to reboot, and your response is to twiddle through your application windows to show me how important your work is and how impossible it is for you to save and quit for the 5 minutes it would take to reboot, then your disconnected network drives will not be recovered. I could be Bill Gates troubleshooting for you and still your network dirves would not be able to connect. Really.
2. Looking at me like I have the pox when I try to explain to you the mechanics of FTP (because you wanted me to "make it work with one button", and I have no idea what you're talking about) and rolling your eyes at me because I'm so geeky will not make you cooler. Maybe you came from a more "creative" background where people looked and dressed better, but those people will not give you the ability to "make it happen in one click".
   I will.So pay attention.
3. Shouting "ASP! Wah! Never do for a long time already!" when you see me coding and slapping me on the back will not make me feel that you are a comrade-in-arms and will not motivate me to start a shallow conversation with you on how difficult you used to find your one-hour-a-week programming lessons back in your university days, when you probably spent most of your time as a member of the canoeing team. Standing behind me to admire my (admittedly rather messy) coding and making gushing comments about how difficult it all looks will not impress me. It demeans both our intelligences, in fact, and is an invasion of privacy, even though I'm pretty sure you don't understand what I'm typing.
4. Email addresses do not need to have a dot seperating first and last names. It is not an internet standard. It is not a corporate standard. It is not even this particular company's standard. Maybe your last three companies decorated their employees' addresses with flourishes of dots, dashes and underscores but we don't do that here. Really, it's not an internet standard. No, I don't think people will be "confused and unable to comprehend the lack of dots-and-dashes". Nor will it be more difficult to remember an email address that is not saturated with a cocktail of special characters. Really.
   Oh, and it doesn't matter if you CAPITALIZE EVERYTHING neither. THISFUCKINGEMAILADDRESS@REALLYHARDTOREAD.COM is the same as thisfuckingemailaddress@reallyhardtoread.com. Really.
5. You do not need to borrow a book from the library to learn how to use "CutePDF Writer". It has a total of ten options in it's "Advanced Options", all of which are simple drop down menus with two options and I have already demonstrated their use. If need be, I can hold your hand while you run it for the first time, or show you several more times how to use it, but surely it cannot be that difficult. I'm sure you didn't manage to get your degree by looking at people with large piteous eyes all the time. If you need more help than that, a book will not provide you with the help you need.
   A lobotomy might.
6. Telling me that you never used to do any of the IT stuff, that you always left it to the "grunts" of the IT department and that you really can't afford to get involved in "nitty-gritty details like that" will not make me your good friend. If I do not wish to sit or talk to you during lunch-time and you do not understand why, then I guess not working in the IT line does not necessarily make you more humane.
7. I am not omniscient, nor have I traded my soul to Microsoft for infinite knowledge in the ways of their products. Telling me "Something is wrong with Outlook" and then standing aside to look at me as if I was about to pull Magical Problem Solving Bunnies out of my sleeves is not a good way to introduce a problem.
8. Shouting at me from across the room is not a nice way to get help of any kind, unless you are being eaten by a shark. In which case I do not think I would be of much help (except perhaps for cheering on said shark).
9. I am not your personal IT guru. I have other things to do than to spend time creating tacky email headers and pop-ups for you. I know your "previous IT guy could do it in 10 minutes", but you can't do it in a thousand, so don't compare. Anyway he left because he couldn't stand you and your continuous whining and pleading for MORE! MORE!, so looks like you're gonna have to settle for slow service, huh?
10. Telling me "I don't know - I didn't touch anything" when I can feel the sweat on the mouse from your sweaty grasp is a lousy lie, and demeans my intelligence, as well as yours. I will not scold you for uninstalling IIS on the web server accidentally, because I know it is not your fault that you do not read warning messages and that dialog boxes with prominent exclaimation-mark-icons are nothing but obstructions to you from opening your corrupted Word document containing a myriad of viruses that your friend sent to you because she too, has nothing better to do at work than propogate pictures of babies.
11. I don't care how cute the babies are - the email that they came in contained viruses (or at least some very hostile-looking macros). Don't open the file and don't ask me to spend an hour cleaning it for you just so you can see the babies.
    You want babies that much, go have sex.
12. If you "used to do some Photoshop, but it was a long time ago, so now I can't really remember anything, by the way where's the tool for drawing a line?" then you should not be putting down "Proficient in Photoshop" in your resume. Being good at "coordinating IT staff" does not come under the heading of "IT Proficiencies" neither.
13. It is the age of digital communications and shorthand has changed the way we speak and write, but even a "plz" will still get you very far. "Thks!" can also still be quite helpful. Being a Marxist-nightmare-incarnate and demanding that I DO THIS FOR YOU RIGHT NOW because it is YOUR JOB AND YOU HAVE NO CHOICE does not appeal to me, no matter how cold and inhumane you think that people in the IT line are.

Cunninglingus in North Korea (or The Power of the Written Word)

*Warning: if you are prone to epilepsy, read slowly, or have a relatively poor command of English (can't catch up with subtitles at the cinema) then avoid these links*

Cunninglingus in North Korea, from Young-Hae Heavy Industries - pseudo-philosophical-trash wrapped in Flash, presented with jazz and animated with pizzazz (sorry I couldn't help myself).

More enjoyable than YouTube, I think, for those who can appreciate it.

(Oh, and it helps a lot to reduce the window size - the Flash scales down and the text becomes more readable)

Wherein birds run amok!

Most interesting thing that happened all week:

A couple of days ago, I was working most diligently in my office (container located on a precarious slope in Sentosa) when suddenly there's a knock on the office door and a man pops his head in to ask if we'd seen a white bird around.

It takes me a while to digest this information, and I stare rather stupified at him he provides me with more information - that the bird's name is Stimpy (or something to that effect, my ears don't work too well when I'm thinking).

I reply that No, I haven't seen any such "bird" (the thought popped into my head that he was some kind of pervert with a naming fetish), and he pops out the office door. The situation was, of course, too weird to stomache, so I follow him out, only to find more people running around the area near my office looking for aforementioned bird. Sentosa Rangers, from their uniforms. My colleague, who'd been stunned when she walked out of the toilet to find a dozen Sentosa Rangers running around outside screaming for Stimpy, explained to me that Stimpy had rebelled during a Bird Show at the amphitheatre (which is situated really near my office) and had fled near our premises.

Fortunately, Stimpy's wings had been clipped, so the Rangers reasoned that he wouldn't have been able to fly very far. We watched the Rangers for a while before going in again.

It was later reported that Stimpy had been found - they had discovered him cawing away on a tree and had lured it down with some bird treats.

Oh how little we trade our freedom for, little Stimpy.

---

Movies I have watched recently: X-Men 3, Anotomie de L'Enfer, Da Vinci Code and Barbarella, Queen of the Galaxy. I guess it says something about me that the one I enjoyed the most was Barbarella, with it's psychedelic sets, cheesy (if not for the knowledge that English Language Majors read this blog I would put CHEEEESIIEEEY, with special emphasis on CHEEEEEEEEZZZ) special effects. And Jane Fonda, spewing off pseudo-science, wearing nothing, and signing off with a raised salute to Love.

The sixties looked so FUN.