Planning Makes Perfect!?!

Back in Lancaster University where I did my PhD, there was an old professor who had the following sign outside his door:

"A lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part!"

This piece of fundamentally sound wisdom has always guided my own dealings with time and deadlines. If you want to get things done on time, make sure that you plan well ahead. Don't do things at the last minute. Plan for every eventuality. Make sure you have enough toner or ink in your printer. Make sure your presentation slides work perfectly. Make sure your laptop is compatible with the projector at the venue you are teaching at. Make sure you know where your meeting is taking place before you set off, etc etc etc.

Basically, use the brains God gave you and think ahead!!

But if I had a ten ringgit note for every one of my students who heed this advice, I think I would be a very poor man indeed. I might just have enough money to eat one meal a day. Let me tell you why...

I have been teaching for some years now, and this lack of forethought on the part of my young charges never fails to raise my blood temperature. And it's not just a Malaysian thing - I have taught in other countries such as Poland and the UK, and have found the same thing happening time and time again.

Here is how it usually plays out in my context. Many of the classes I teach require the students to do some presentations. Because we are in the 21st Century now, that means using a laptop PC connected to an LCD projector, running Microsoft PowerPoint. Our students are absolute wizards with PowerPoint - they can make it sing and dance with stunning and breathtaking graphical backgrounds and sound effects downloaded from mysterious places on the Internet, highly original photos plagiarised from various websites, and of course Macromedia Flash animations and amusing little YouTube videos that have me laughing like a drain for days and days after seeing them...

I really wish I had the time and the talent for such technological prowess, but I don't. Instead, I am condemned to sit through the scenarios that arise when the creators of such marvels fail utterly to plan ahead. Here are the most common planning failures which result in class presentations taking much more time than they should:

1. The presentation group walk up to the computer, plug their thumb drive in, and find that their version of the software doesn't work with the version on the PC in the classroom. And they have, being such tech mages, used the very latest version of the software to create their presentations without saving the file in a backwardly-compatible format!

2. The group walk up to the computer, plug their thumb drive in, and find, after several minutes of feverish head movements and pulling of hair, that their file has a malicious virus which makes it totally impossible to run on the computer. And of course, they didn't check the file for viruses before they came to class....

3. One of the group comes up and informs you that they have brought the wrong file/thumb drive/CD/laptop with them. "Sir, can I go back to my room and get it?"

4. The group start to load the file from their thumb drive, only to find out that for some reason, the fancy graphics in their presentation do not work on the PC in the classroom. Hence they will ask to swap the classroom PC with their laptop, which takes at least ten minutes to carry out...

5. The group starts to present, and it becomes obvious that they are going to carry on for at least another hour, even though you have given them 15 minutes.

6. They forget to check the spelling and grammar on their slides, or ask me to do it.

7. They forget all the advice and training I gave them about maintaining eye contact, not reading from the slides, using screwed up colour combinations for slides, etc (not strictly a planning error but equally irritating!).

What can we do about this? I must say don't have a clue. But I can offer the following advice:

1. Rehearse your talk so that you know how much time you're going to take
2. Check that your file is compatible with earlier software versions than yours
3. Don't use too many fancy graphics and multimedia features. You do not get extra marks for PowerPoint wizardry. Keep it Short and Simple (KISS).
4. Check your spelling and grammar before the talk. Ask your lecturer. That's what he or she gets paid for!
5. Back up your work on two thumb drives, a CD and even email a copy of it to yourself. You never know what can happen!
6. Check your file for viruses.
7. Basically, be careful, have pride in what you do and most of all PLAN AHEAD!!

Now, let's see if I can increase the number of ten ringgit notes I can collect now.......

Where Do They Get Them From?

Being involved in the Malaysian debating scene has taught me a great deal about the way young Malaysians use the English language, or try to anyway. Now don't get me wrong - even though I teach English for a living, I'm not going to moan and groan about the appalling standard of English among my young charges. I think I'll leave that to other worthy voices, like the editors of the excellent Star Online Mind Our English page.

Now, in the debating world, you see all sorts when it comes to English usage. You get complete linguistic basket cases who can't even speak for more than a couple of minutes without raping the English language with their every utterance. Or you might get wonderfully electrifying performances from smart young orators worthy of Cicero. And most of the time, of course, you get something in between.

During my recent trip to the Borneo Cup in Kota Kinabalu, I saw examples of all three of the above categories, although I must say that the standard of English, if not always the standard of debating, was much better this year.

But English is not the only criterion for success in debating, nor is it even the most important. Debates are normally judged on three criteria - Matter, Manner and Method. Matter refers to the substance of the arguments put forward and their supporting evidence and rebuttals. Manner covers the style and delivery of the speaker and, obviously, the standard of his or her English. Finally, there is Method, which refers to the way the case is structured, and how the team work together to put the case forward effectively.

However, despite the fact that I have to pay more attention to the arguments in a debate, not the way they are worded, I can't help noticing aspects of the debaters' language. One example came after one of the quarter final sessions which I judged. The students came up to me during the coffee break for an oral adjudication. One of the boys in the team asked me for advice on his language. I said "fine, but you used a couple of words you shouldn't have used".

One of the words he used in the debate was that quaint old English parade-ground expletive 'bollocks'. I nearly fell off my chair laughing when I heard the word coming out of his mouth as if he were an English football hooligan! It was like Snow White telling one of the seven dwarfs to F*** off!!

Now the word 'bollocks', if you look it up in the dictionary, is a rather coarse word referring to a man's genitalia. It can be used to express utter disgust or disagreement, as in "bollocks to that!" or it can be used to say that something is rubbish or nonsense, as in "you're talking a load of bollocks".

So you can imagine the look on the poor boy's face when I calmly informed him in my best professorial voice that 'bollocks' is just a couple of ranks below the F word in the lexical naughtiness rankings!!

Now, it's at times like that when I realise that English language teaching courses in Malaysia just don't teach this kind of words to kids. And yet when they go out into the big wide world, get a job and hopefully interact with English-speaking people, or watch English language TV programmes, they are going to hear all sorts of swear words and slang expressions. And they won't have a clue what to do with them!

I daresay that our young Cicero had heard the word being used in the context of the English Premier League, that bastion of linguistic cleanliness and innocence which is so popular among Malaysian TV addicts. So by extension he thought he could use the word in the formal august confines of the debating chamber without giving his adjudicator a cardiac arrest!!

A similar story happened a couple of years ago when I adjudicated a debate in Shah Alam in mainland Malaysia. One of the debaters in that particular round will always stick in my mind. He was bald, built like a basketball player and wore very big and expensive looking bracelets on his wrists. When he spoke, he sounded just like one of those gangsta rappers you see on MTV - his performance liberally punctuated with the street argot and body language of a loose-limbed, happenin' homie. Basically, I hardly understood a word.

So afterward, I asked him where he learned his English. He told me he had picked up most of his English from the lyrics of rap and hip-hop songs. The scary thing was that he was a student in my own university, where the students study English up to 20 hours a week, and gangsta rap is definitely not on the syllabus! Needless to say, our homie didn't win the debate!!

This reminds me of an old joke about the king of a distant Pacific island who visited London to meet Queen Elizabeth. When he met the Queen, and she asked him if he had had a good flight, he replied: "weeee weeeee fizzzz wooo wooo didididit diditdidit crackle I had a very fine flight thank you your Majesty!"

Later on, the Queen asked him how many wives he had, to which he replied "crackle crackle fizzzzz weee woooowooooweeee I have sixteen wives your majesty" After this strange form of conversation went on for some time, the Queen took her foreign guest aside and asked him bluntly "Your majesty, just where did you learn your English?"

To which he replied "weeee weeee ooooweeeee crackle crackle fizzzzz the BBC World Service!"

See what I mean?!

City of Fire

Well, folks, I'm back from an entirely tiger-free trip to that Bornean Paradise known as Kota Kinabalu.

Kota Kinabalu, or KK as it's known to us Borneo cognoscenti, is the capital city of Sabah, the other Malaysian state in Borneo. Unlike Kuching, KK is a sea-side town, squeezed into a valley that hugs the South China Sea coastline, a god's stone's throw from South East Asia's tallest mountain, Mount Kinabalu.

KK's name is the latest in a long-running and complex saga, interestingly. In colonial times, when Sabah was known by the rather obvious name of British North Borneo, the city was known as Jesselton, named after Sir Charles Jessel, who was Vice Chairman of the North Borneo Company. There is still a Jesselton Hotel on Gaya Street, which is probably KK's last throwback to those days of pith helmets and planter shorts.

But after the British burned the city down to stop the invading Japanese from getting their hands on it during the War, Jesselton became known for a while as Api-Api, or simply Api. Api is the Malay word for 'fire'. There are many theories as to why a seaside town would be named after fire. One of the most colourful relates to the late 19^th Century rebellion by the Bajau leader Mat Salleh, in which the British administrative office on the nearby Gaya Island was burned down.

Who knows? But one thing that is certain is that Api was quickly renamed Jesselton after the defeat of the Japanese in 1945, when the British Administration was restored. And after Independence in the 1960s, when North Borneo joined Malaysia as Sabah, the city became Kota Kinabalu, literally ‘Kinabalu city’ (or fort).

So there you have it. Look it up on the Wikipedia if you don’t believe me!!

Now, one of the many things I love about KK is the view from the plane as you come in to land. If you are lucky and the weather is fine, on one side you'll see the city, and the airport buildings, but on the other side you'll see the clear turquoise ocean. I must remember to suggest to Air Asia to play the theme tune to Hawaii Five-O on the speaker system whenever they approach KK airport. Because it really feels like you are coming into Hawaii. Da da da da DAH da, da da da da DAH....

Now what was Prof Madder doing in KK, you all scream? Well, it's like this. One of my many roles is that of Debate Club Adviser in my university. And, we went to KK to take part in the rather grand-sounding Borneo Cup Debating Championship.

The competition took place on the heartbreakingly beautiful campus of the University Malaysia Sabah, which deserves a whole blog posting to itself. UMS is a relatively new university in Malaysia, and is spread around a breathtaking array of lush hills and sparkling bays some way outside KK city.

Anyway, our contingent of debaters consisted of two teams and you’ll never guess what? We won the championship!!!! It was literally a case of ‘we came, we saw, we debated, we conquered’!

Our first team, consisting of three coolly arrogant young wags who remind me of myself in my youth, managed to wrest the trophy from our traditional rivals Swinburne University of Technology and University Malaysia Sarawak. Even the second team, made up of three girls, managed a quarter final place. I am so happy for them!!

So you can imagine that these six young debaters and myself are feeling somewhat damn pleased with ourselves at the moment!

Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair!!!!

Endangered Species...?

Here's a funny thought.

I was eating my breakfast in Chillipeppers the other day when a horrifying notion slipped into my otherwise untroubled brain. I looked around at my fellow diners in the restaurant and I realised that nearly all of them had something in common. You know what it was?

They were nearly all eating chicken!!

Even my dear wife sitting opposite me was tucking into a plate of fried noodles with bits of chicken in it. I was eating a chicken sandwich, and various people around the room were eating chicken in various shapes and forms - fried, steamed, sliced, curried.

That set me to thinking just how fundamentally important chickens must be to the Malaysian food industry. Just think how many thousands and thousands and thousands of chickens are reared, fed and slaughtered every year just so that Malaysian gourmands and their foreign guests like me can enjoy this most delicious and succulent of meats.

Then I thought, what must it be like to be a chicken? Well, it must be a pretty scary and precarious existence. Just imagine, you start life so hopefully and positively, cracking open the egg with your little beak with such lust for life, such hope for the future. Then, you wobble around getting used to living in this world and if you're lucky, you might be allowed to roam free around the farmyard, pecking at seeds or whatever, and if you are really skillful and fortunate, you might not get run over by a motorbike or eaten by a dog.

And the rather more unlucky ones will of course be brought up in overcrowded, de-humanising (de-chickenising?) conditions in a battery farm with a couple of square millimetres of floor space to live in and no TV. But at least they are alive. Just.

And whether free range or battery, all these poor optimistic creatures will be fed and fed so that they grow bigger and fatter, and the females will be forced to produce eggs. And then, one day, they will be taken away and slaughtered. Halal or non-halal, it's still the same thing. Dead is dead. Then they end up in our stomachs. So it goes....

So I was thinking, which is the most endangered animal on Earth? Most people might say the tiger. But is it the tiger or the chicken? Just think about it for a moment, before screaming at me.

Let's look at the tiger. Sure, there are lots of commendable efforts to save the tigers from extinction and all that but, let's face it, they are still heading for extinction. That's mainly because firstly, some people make big money selling tigers' whiskers and other tiger parts to rich men all over South East Asia who want to improve their sexual performance. And let us not forget that tigers go around eating people and people don't like that, so they are going to still try their best to kill as many tigers as they can. So tigers are doomed.

But chickens, as far as I know, none of their bits are used as aphrodisiacs. Also, crucially, chickens don't kill anybody. In fact, it's the other way around. And there are absolutely millions and millions of them. So even though it must be quite scary and worrying to be a chicken, at least their survival as a species is secure, as long as people keep on eating them.

So my message to those trying to save the tigers is quite simple. Start eating tigers. Tiger steaks. Tiger burgers. Tiger sandwiches. Tiger biscuits!! That way, the long term survival of the tiger will be as secure and safe as that of the chicken!!!

;-)

In Praise of "Lepak"

The Malays have this wonderful concept called 'lepak'. The word roughly translates into English as something like 'hanging out' or 'loafing around'. Sitting around with a few friends chewing the fat, or just sitting there, thinking or reading the paper or listening to music.

I love 'lepaking', as does my wife. Especially at the Kuching Airport branch of Starbucks. Annie and I lepak there whenever we have free time in the evenings. She sees it as a good therapy for cheering her up while she is undergoing radiotherapy, but I see it as an excuse to drink good coffee and to peoplewatch. But you may be wondering to yourselves how does a high flying professor like me find the time to lepak in Starbucks?

Not only that, but I must not forget that lepaking is somewhat frowned upon by many upstanding members of Malaysian society. Lepaking is often quoted in the sensational press as one of the 'social ills' alongside drugs, alcohol and sex that are rapidly taking over the youths of the nation.

Well, I have little argument about the evils of drugs and even alcohol and sex, but come on folks, honestly, what is wrong with a little bit of mild lepaking once in a while? Surely, everyone is doing it, so why can't we?!?

I mean, imagine what life would have been like if certain great historical figures had not indulged in some lepaking?

Let me give you an example or two if I may. Take William Wordsworth, who wrote that most iconic of poems "I wandered lonely as a cloud, that floats on high o'er vales and hills, when all at once I saw a crowd, a host of golden daffodils". Now do you honestly think he wrote that while running around madly in his house doing the washing up and the housework, or driving his horse and cart to the office through the London traffic? No. Wordsworth is surely one of history's most celebrated lepakers, because it was his singular act of lepaking through the hills and vales that inspired him to such heights of poetic greatness.

Not yet convinced? OK, let us take Sir Isaac Newton, the discoverer of gravity. The history books tell us that his discovery of the laws of gravity was the direct result of his being hit on the bonce by an apple that fell out of the tree that he was lepaking under. So, if it wasn't for Newton deciding to have a quick lepak under that fateful apple tree, then we wouldn't know the difference between up or down!!

They say that we also serve, who only stand and wait. I say that we also serve, who only sit and think. Just because we may be sitting around, coffee in hand, chatting away with friends doesn't mean that we are not doing something useful. Many university professors and businesspeople all over the world do their best thinking and intellectual work while sitting down in the coffee bar discussing their research with their friends or doing business deals in pubs, clubs and restaurants.

Unfortunately, however, I have found that sitting around like that in my university will attract disapproving stares from my colleagues. Most people cannot equate physical inactivity with work. So they think that if you are lepaking on the job, then you must be lazy, or have too much time on your hands.

But lepaking is good for you because not only does it help to cement the social bonds between people who are often highly stressed but it helps your mind to relax and focus on serious work. It actually makes you more productive. And furthermore, when you lepak in places like Starbucks, it takes on a whole different dimension. Lepaking becomes an art, a lifestyle choice.

I think I'll start a new academic discipline: lepakology. The study of hanging around in a Malaysian context. I'll carry out research into what lepaking means to those who indulge in it. I'll write papers on lepaking and submit them to learned international journals on the citation index, and I'll even organise an international symposium on lepakology. Perhaps, if God is willing, I might even be awarded a university Chair in lepakology!!!!!

But until that happens, the only chairs I will be occupying will be the soft, luxurious sofas outside the Kuching Airport branch of Starbucks, where my wife and I can drink coffee, and play scrabble, and watch the young things go by, and dream....

Fast Food (?)

I really must stop doing this. Going into fast food restaurants, I mean. Having to wait hours and hours and hours and then getting substandard crud which I will then go and moan about on my blog. Ho hum!!

This evening I went to my favourite (!) fast food joint in Mile Three with my nephew for a quick fill up. As usual, there were about half a million people queuing up to be served and, as usual, only two of the three counters were open.

As the late great Kurt Vonnegut might have said: So It Goes....

So, we were patiently waiting for the queue to crawl forward at a glacial pace when we encountered what is probably the most pointless 'customer service' phenomenon in the history of world food retailing. Let me explain.

Please nod if you have experienced this, gentle readers. You are stuck in a long slow queue behind people who can't make up their ****** minds what they want, or who are ordering enough food for a whole planeload of people and taking so ****** long about it. Suddenly, out of nowhere pops one of the restaurant's little red robots carrying a menu and a little pad in his hand.

The robot beeps and mumbles politely and asks you what you would like to order. You point at the menu, he gets it wrong several times, beeps and whirrs quite a bit, but eventually he ticks off your order on his little pad and tears off a slip for you to take to the counter.

So, thinking you will be served faster by doing this, you present the slip of paper to the server (when finally it's your turn of course!) The server asks you to go through the order again, laboriously repeating everything in loud, discordant broken English. Then you wait for your order to be prepared and you pay as normal.

Sounds good, doesn't it? But, don't you think that there is an element of redundancy there somewhere? I mean, call me a few bricks short of a full load, but it seems to me that you don't really need to have a little robot taking your order while you are waiting in the queue, only to have to present your order again to someone else later. Why doesn't the manager assign the little robot to operate the closed counter, so that the queue can be reduced more quickly?

My dear wife disagrees with me on this, of course. She tells me that the little robot's job is not redundant at all, because most people take such a long time to take their orders, dilly dallying about and chatting to each other etc, and therefore it is quicker to simply let them make their order in advance and present the little slip of paper to the counter.

Well, I'm not entirely convinced. But for the sake of marital bliss, I will reserve judgment for the time being.......

Ticket to Rad...

Although it's Chinese New Year, and the bangs and "fire flowers" are all the rage, I am not going to write about Chinese New Year today. I thought I would take this opportunity to update you all on the progress of my dear wife through her fight against breast cancer.

Well, so far it's looking quite hopeful. She finished her four doses of chemical poisoning back in December, and she is now undergoing radiotherapy. Her shining bald head is now covered with a fuzzy carpet of short black hair, making her look something like a US Marine recruit!

For those of you who have never encountered radiotherapy, it is nowhere near as bad as chemotherapy, but it's still quite scary. It basically involves the patient being directly exposed to rays of radiation for short bursts, usually up to ten minutes at a time. The rays are directed at the area where the cancer was situated, which in Annie's case is the scar tissue where her left breast used to be.

Before the radiation can be administered, there has to be a planning session, where the patient is measured and X-rayed to make sure the body can take the appropriate dosages. This took place back in early January, and took 1 1/2 hours. I wasn't allowed to take any pictures because, as you can imagine, radiation does awful things to your body, especially a man's sexual organs, so you'd better keep away from the stuff unless you are wearing a pair of lead-lined boxer shorts!

However, this is the only really good picture I was able to take:



After the planning session, there was a wait for a week or so and then they called us in for the verdict. Annie was prescribed 25 radiotherapy sessions, which were to be given every day, five days a week, for five weeks. This involves getting up hyper-early in the morning to go to the hospital, wait in their lovely waiting room, and then Annie goes into a science-fiction chamber where she is laid down on a bed, and zapped by a large machine that fires rads at her.

In terms of side effects, there are few. Firstly, it doesn't seem to hurt much, though Annie complains of some skin irritation around the area of her operation scar, and she was told there may be some blistering later. Also, she feels tired and very dry, and her body temperature goes up quite frequently. The body temperature is managed by frequent drinks of coconut juice, which is really good for keeping your temperature down in the tropics.

Also, she comes out of her sessions with her upper chest covered in pen marks and strange squiggles and crosses. These bizarre literacy practices are the result of the radiographers trying to mark out the right spot for the radiation to be aimed at. Also, Annie cannot clean herself with soap in that area, so she goes around with these weird tattoos most of the time, her chest looking like a cave wall festooned by marks left behind by an alien civilisation!

But despite all this, Annie is much happier, because the radiation is not as bad as the chemo. When the rads finish at the end of February, she will be mamogrammed once more to see if the treatment has worked. I am praying and hoping that it has...

As I write this, Annie has had 14 zaps, with 11 to go. Let's keep our fingers crossed, and hope that Annie's "ticket to rad" is her ticket to a full recovery!!