By far, the most enlightening class I ever took was an English class (which I subsequently left after the first day). While it didn’t teach me much about the subject, it opened my eyes to the extreme political and philosophical bias in many of our colleges today. A bias that rewards those who agree with the doctrine professed by instructors, and punishes any thoughts that contradict their beliefs. This isn’t as big an issue in many schools, and it certainly varies between teachers, subjects of study, departments and the makeup of the students in a class, but it my case, the hypocrisy of these “enlightened” teachers was on full display that day, and taught me to question not just the statements people make, but their motives for making them.

The class began as most do, with the distribution and reading of a syllabus, a brief introductory of the instructor and students, and then proceeded to the professor’s overview of the class’ objective.

“This will be like no class you’ve ever taken” she began. “Here, we won’t just learn about English literature, but also learn how to apply it to real situations, with an emphasis on women’s suffrage and black rights”.

I double checked my schedule, to be sure I was in the correct room. Yes, room 206 at 10:00am in the English building, I was in the right place. And the title of the class in my schedule confirmed what she was now scribbling on the chalk board “Thirteenth Century English Literature”.

So I raised my hand. “What does English literature in the 1200′s have to do with women and black rights?” A fair question I thought, but apparently, I was wrong. She muttered some round-about answer that dodged the question while staring scornfully at me.

I asked again, hoping I could clarify the question. “Weren’t the major English writers of the time men? Mostly monks I thought, with such high illiteracy among the non-clergy.” She hesitated in her response, so I wen’t on. “…and since the period predates the Northern European colonization of Africa, how many English writers had ever seen a black man?”

“Well,” she answered, “we’re looking at the link between what they wrote and racism and misogyny today”.

“So the writings were influential to the suffrage and civil rights movements?”

She quipped back “I don’t think you can understand what we’re teaching here, your a white man, so you don’t have the perspective needed to see the link between these topics.”

“Couldn’t it equally be the case that I haven’t read any 13th century English writings, and that’s why I don’t understand?” The annoyance was becoming obvious in my voice.

She stormed out of the room, in a hissy fit, saying she couldn’t teach a bunch of ignorant rednecks.

So, one bad teacher I thought. I’ve had plenty of good instructors in the past, she was just a fluke. I wen’t to the bursar’s office and tried to get my money back for the class. I had little interest in the subject anyway, and was only taking the class because it offered dual credit towards my degree.

I was told that, in spite of this class starting late in the term, it was in fact past the drop-add period and I would need a letter from my department head to get a refund. I made an appointment to see him. When I arrived at his office, four of my teachers were there to have a talk with me. If he was to sign off on my refund paperwork, the policy was that I needed counseling first from the staff . They proceeded to tell me how shocked they were at my behavior, how disappointed they were in me. The terms racist and sexist came up more than once. I reminded them that my girlfriend was half black, so as a woman and a minority, she could attest to the fact that I wasn’t some bigot. I was merely questioning the link between the course presented in the course outline I saw when I enrolled, and the very different subject matter I was presented in the class, not to criticize it, but just to understand why such a discrepancy existed between what was advertised and what the school was really giving me. My refund was refused. They strongly urged me to change major, as this teacher I had offended was the head of the department who oversaw all the humanities classes that qualified for the computer science degree I was pursuing. I would need to go through her to graduate.

“She doesn’t like me” I said, “but isn’t it a bit petty to assume she’d pressure a teacher to fail me on those grounds, even if my grades are passing”. That seemed to be what they were implying, but they acted offended that I understood what their implications were. I was then told that I may not be a “good fit for this school”.

I had paid up all of my other classes, so I continued through the semester. At this time, I carried a 3.9 GPA, which dropped a whole point by the end of the semester. I’m confident my grades were passing, but papers and lab projects I handed in were graded as incomplete, as though the teachers had never received them. Only one teacher stood by me and acted fairly. One of Eight teachers had any integrity.

I changed schools, stepping back to a community college (with a 2.9GPA for a spring transfer, that was the only option available to me). The community college was more fair, but I began to notice certain similarities. The math instructor who likes to review political polls, and then segway into his beliefs on the fallacies of the electoral college and it’s injustice. 40 minute rants to solve one equation. The robotics and manufacturing technologies teacher who advocates the wonders of automation, but insists they must not be used to displace union labor, in spite of the efficiency or cost. As for English teachers, I have yet to meet one with an ounce of sanity or a shred of integrity, they must be out there, but they aren’t teaching in a school near me. The students who succeed in college are the ones who keep their heads down and write what the instructor wants to hear, saving criticism for when they’re off campus. Even a number of the professors who seem to have contrary opinions to what most of the staff believes are careful not to make waves, and will seldom speak frankly to a student who may repeat it in front of another teacher.

That class changed my outlook on many things. I have great respect for those who can tolerate 6 years of college. After all that, they’ll tolerate pretty much anything, which often includes lower wages. Let’s face facts, if I’m hiring two people, one with 6 years of college, and one with 6 years work experience but no college, my experience tells me to value the latter. I’ll bet my money on the man who spent the better part of a decade in the real world, than the trained, professional Yes-Man who knows how to tell me what I want to hear while secretly harboring the ideals imprinted on him by deranged, intellectually stagnate hippie douche bags. That may not be the case with all graduates, but it’s the right call most of the time and I make no apologies for my belief.

…

My history professor said it in jest, but I have witnessed how true his statement is: “Those who can’t do, teach. Those who can’t teach, teach in college.”

Recently Bill Gates opened his new personal Web site the Gates Notes, where he writes about what he’s learning lately. That suddenly reminded of my true passion of all time – learning. That’s right, I love learning things of all kinds: technical, philosophical fluff talks or anything, it’s just always fun. That is going to be the new direction of my blog – I’ll write about what I’m learning lately and my new wicked ideas, so all of you out there can get a sip of my greatness.

Kudos to Bill for the nice idea and inspiration. You probably deserve to be so rich after all, bastard.

Today I was approached by that dude. Long story short, I gave him some money, then I went for dinner. On my way back after my dinner, I saw him standing at the exact same spot talking to another stranger. Oh well. I’ve learned another lesson.

That got me thinking, though. Would there be a way for me to distinguish the real helpless poeple from this lowly parasites? On the long way back home I’ve come up with a couple of strategies:

Get deposit

You know when you stay at a hotel they need to collect deposit from you upon check in? That’s to protect the hotel from you running away without checking out. Surprisingly, I think this would be a really effective strategy to mess up the scammers’ routines. You can give him money, but only on the condition that he gives something of similar value back to you.

You know, if his friends really are coming to rescue him tomorrow, then he would have no problem for you to keep his own purse. Get his passport, ID card, anything that would make the scammer’s day really difficult.

Of course, if anyone is asking for just an emergency help, then you shouldn’t be giving out money that’s worthing more than a passport. That way, if he takes away your money, he’s going to get himself more trouble by losing his ID card/passport.

Do it for him, don’t give him money

But what if he says he’s been robbed or his purse has been stolen? If he really doesn’t have anything valualbe, and you really feel like helping others, then just help him without giving him money.

He needs to go somewhere else to meet his friends? Grab a taxi, pre-pay the taxi driver and send him out. He needs to eat? Buy him the cheapest bread from around and give him that. He needs to make a phone call? Grab several coins and actually dial the number for him in a phone booth.

When all else fails, look for the cops

If all else doens’t work, and you still want to help this buddy. Do not take out your wallet! The moment you take it out, you’ve lost. He might snatch it from you. His friend might snatch it from behind. Heck, a mob of people may pop out of nowhere. When they don’t know where you put your wallet, you’re still safe. But when you take it out exposed before this suspicious guy that cannot give you any deposit and is asking for a bizarre favor that you cannot do for him on the spot, you’ve just basically expressed your intention to give him freebies.

If he’s really in need of help, call the local police. The cops would be more than willing to help him. This one works particularly well because if the guy sees you talking to police and are still looking relatively calm, he might really be that urban legendary helpless poor man on the street.

Trust is not a protection

You see, all of the above “strategies” do not center around identifying the guy. Rather, I would find ways to protect myself in the case he frauds. That particular scammer that got my money was pretty well-prepared. You know, I tried to be cautious by asking all the particular details: “What is your job?” “Where are you from?” “What exactly will you do next?” He answered all of those with vivid details. Then again, perhaps what I asked was a little bit too shallow. He might have been asked the same questions a hundred times in a day.

The point is, if your opponent is a professional con artist, then chances are he will out-speak you and be able to convince you. Heck, that’s what they do for a living!

My conclusion was that getting a job is probably suitable for the “stable” people who won’t want too many fluctuations and just want to get by, while being an entrepreneur is not for the faint-hearted but will definitely bring greater rewards if you are not too dumb.

His conclusion was that getting a job is the way to go for except the really brilliant people, and his reason was we have run out of ideas in today’s world and it is too difficult to compete with established giant companies if we don’t invent new ideas.

So really, is that the case?

On the surface, his conclusion seemed to have a lot of truth to it. I remember my dad telling me the same thing when I was a child, and I couldn’t come up with a clever new invention idea to challenge his stance. Even today, I can’t come up with some cool ideas on the spot. So it would be normal for most people to reach that we have run out of new ideas to start a new, successful business.

I don’t think so

But then, I really put some thinking into that, and I could see that there are in fact endless possibilities still waiting for us to discover. How did I know? I asked myself this simple question, “Does everything in the world that we live in simply just works?” Obviously, anybody will tell you how something, many things, don’t work quite right in their lives. As opposed to having to come up with constructive ideas, just blaming what’s not working (or put another way, inconveniences of life) is a lot easier. I can come up with a few on the spot here:

• I still spend a significant amount (maybe 5 – 15%) of my life on transportation.
• I recently permed my hair curly, and I am constantly worrying that I might do something wrong that will make it straight.
• If I want to eat some food I enjoy, I’m constantly counting the calories.
• Urban countries dump tons of food every day. Third world countries dump tons of corpses every day.
• I have to manually clean my ass with toilet paper every time after I defecate.

OK the last one might sound like a cheap joke but it’s a pretty legitimate issue, when we look at the fact that flush toilet is considered one of the inventions with most impacts by many scientists.

See, there are countless small things that are still screaming for improvements in our daily lives. It’s just that we don’t notice them. Many people think that it would take a rocket scentist to make some ground breaking invention, which is totally not true. For example, I recently came across this brilliant new device:

Approximately 3,000 woodworkers get their finger cut by a saw like that every year. This new invention, which consists of no next-generation scientific discoveries, is saving 3,000 woodworkers’ fingers every year.

The point I want to illustrate here, is that there are still endless possibilities here in the world, and we are not destined to be stuck in a cubicle day in and day out. All it takes is the ambition and the creativity, and we all can do much more meaningful work than sitting in a cubicle.

So until the day when we have all the gadgets in Doraemon, you don’t have to get a job because you can start your own!

Really amazing performers and songwriters.

One very amazing visual kei character is the guitarist Hizaki:

You’ll know what I mean if you do a little research on Hizaki to see what it’s really about

All I had to do was to do a

And add my IME there with elevated privileges. The sudo package I used was sudowin.

Edit: It turns out that I didn’t have to add the IME with elevated privileges, but rather, I must start the IME in an application with elevated privileges once. After that it will be OK for good.

Technical details are for those technically inclined, what a polite and politically correct way to address who these business guys generally think of as nerds. What the fuck, now they are the ones who don’t know shits and they think they can order these educated people around, just because they happen to be wearing shiny suits or whatnot.

The business suckers are worms. They consume and aggravate our society with selfish intents; the school never teaches you how to contribute back to the society when you’ve gotten rich.

Why do Hong Kong people, or developed countries in general, work more hours? Because these suckers keep trying to “push the limits”, they see how people much bullshit people can put up with. If I’m paying $10,000 a month and people are still coming to the recruits, let’s try $9,000 until we’ve got just one/two guy that can put up with that bullshit. If the workers seem to not mind working overtime, why not have all of them work overtime? Shit, they think it’s all a board game.

Academic business people never produce anything like the science people do. I was watching the TV news when I was riding on a train some days ago. It was about university cooperating with some companies to invent a new kind of medicine, helping the human species evolve. You’d see this kind of news every so often, yet I bet you’ve seen the slightest trace of something like this happening in the academic business field, which does zero to help the human evolution process.

One of the best programmers I ever hired had only a High School degree; he’s produced a lot of great software, has his own news group, and made enough in stock options to buy his own nightclub.

For most people, if there isn’t a clear path to Nirvana laid out, they’ll either give up or keep working harder and harder to dig out the path.

That sounds reasonable, yet it is amazing how many of us can’t see what’s wrong with such an approach. If what they are doing isn’t working, why in the world do they keep doing it harder and harder?

When I can’t solve a puzzle by pushing, the answer is often not pushing it harder, but rather to pull it. The average metropolitan today works the whole day every day, and they “sleep back the hours” on weekends. They rarely have time to come up with creative ideas. They are trapped by the society, by the Matrix. Perhaps people call this a rat race for a reason. For people in it are often forced to become as dumb as rats.

Most people can’t answer the question “what do you really want to do in your life?” We need to have a clear goal if we want to achieve anything, but we are all too busy to think about that when we are trapped in the rat race.

The way out is to give yourself a break. Muscles don’t grow when you keep pumping the iron. They grow when you recover after exercise. To really grow, in terms of wealth, health or spirituality, stop working and escape from the Matrix. Let yourself living consciously again.