kelvin quee

Yesterday I was talking to someone about Christianity and science. Incidentally, he was on the topic of apologetics and the bible school he was going through had someone lecturing against Darwinism, as a defense of Christianity.

A strong believer in science, I was of course grappling with the two seemingly antipodal beliefs ever since my secondary school days. Without much thinking, I blurted out, “I believe in Darwinism.”

Suddenly I had many eyes on me. To add weight to my sentence, I mentioned a book, The Science of God, which I had read some 6 years back.

The Science of God by Gerald Schroeder is a book that attempts to reconcile both. It is, in my opinion, rather successful. Biblical facts that were explained and still remained fairly strong in my head are the creation of the universe in 6 days using some relativity and some frame of reference reasoning. Another one was evolution, but I can’t quite remember the explanation.

In any case, I still believe in evolution, but that doesn’t mean that I’m denying God. You don’t have to interpret the Bible literally, in fact, the Bible cannot be interpreted literally. Remember that the Bible is a book written more than four thousand years ago and meant for an audience who cannot explain gravity and thinks that the Earth is flat. We couldn’t have expected God to detail his Universe creation process in detail and still expect believers to swallow it down. The Bible is not meant to be a science text book.

The Bible is surprisingly lacking in detail about Creation, and perhaps it was well-intended. I believe that God had meant it for us Man to find out, and any theory should be debated, reasoned and supported with evidence. Perhaps we’ll never find a satisfactory answer, but that doesn’t mean that we should stop in the search or deny any theory as excellent as Darwin’s “The Origin of Species”. Denial of science and blind adoption of any religious text will only serve to retard human civilisation and enlarge the divide between science and God.

Convergence is the only way.

***still in draft status***

Ubuntu Linux is very slick. Very. And the Gnome interface that comes with it will almost put KDE to shame. It looks very very very friendly, giving me an MacOS System 9 feel and together with it’s “just work” philosophy, it will make a newbie smile at it’s simplicity. Download it. A shameless plug is the minimum I can do for great opensource projects.

Unfortunately the kernel is running 2.6 and my Dlink usb wireless adapter doesn’t like it.

Looks like it’s back to Slackware for me. I’ll be trying Vector Linux flavour of it.

For the rest of the world and some Singaporeans, ORD is the acronym for Operationally Ready Date. It marks the end of 2 years (shortened from 2.5 years) of compulsory, full-time military service to the nation. It’s the holy date for all those in service, marked out millions of times on countless calendars, planners and, unfortunately, on camp walls, military cupboards and vehicles too by our soldiers.

Mine falls on 21 March 2005.

It was a surprisingly uneventful day, even though I’ve been lusting for the day ever since I was enlisted two years ago.

There aren’t many people who I can bade goodbye too. Most have already left. Those still around are leaving. And there aren’t many people who shared the same memories as myself of the place, except a privileged few.

I’ve seen changes in my workplace in 2 years that many wouldn’t have in twice the time. It was an enriching experience, considering the amount of mistakes made. I’ve had my direct superiors changed twice and attached to another unit which restructured thrice in the same year and had new instructions every now and then. In some ways I’m lucky, as they say - while it’s good to learn from your mistakes, it’s better to learn from others’. Mostly, it wasn’t a very pleasant experience. Change can be disorientating and aggravating.

Equally unnerving were the changes this period had on me, I was undergoing the most intensive and introspective phase of my life. I’ve made so many decisions, reversed on them, flipped it around again, dropped it, went on to do the same to something else and came back upon the former again. I apologise to all my friends who had to be dragged into my little mind of pendulum.

It’s hard to put 2 years into words but here’s how it would be if I had to, without going through the details.

The essence of which is, I hate National Service. Yet as much as I do, I’m thankful it taught me so many nasty lessons I wouldn’t learn elsewhere, or would have to at a much later time.

On a lighter note, thank you to all those who, unfortunately, had to know me and taught me something. You know who you are. Thanks. Stay in touch, you have my number. :)

I’ve been running Linux for a few days now. After weeks of clamping it down, especially looking for suitable drivers for my wireless card, it’s now finally working like a dream.

I’m definitely not going to miss Windows.

Admittedly though, it wasn’t easy, not especially when I’ve chosen to use Slackware. You need to be comfortable with command line.

In any case, it’s well rewarded. The satisfaction of running an advanced computing system on older hardware (a 1.1GHz AMD Thunderbird) is overwhelming. It’s time to break the cycle of dumping a computer every 3 years just because it cannot run the latest Microsoft Office anymore. It’s such a big waste.

I remember asking a friend who recently got an Apple Powerbook, “Do you miss any windows applications?”

“No. I don’t. I mean, what else do you need besides a good web browser, email and word processing?” He said.

Very true. And my Linux box can do all these very well.

See this email and my previous post.

Half price is still too much. $5 is still too much. And what about the ads? Are you going to remove them from the paid subscription?

I don’t see why STI has to go “paid” mode in the first place.

I mean, if it’s because of decreasing ad revenue, I think you are missing the whole point. Every netizen can vouch for this, STI is badly designed and not taking full advantage of available ad placement strategies.

(Free, no subscription needed) Suggestions to SPH

1) Clean up your design. The online edition is a wacky world of ad splashes, scrolling news ticker and gaudy colours. Take a lookie at BBC News. Granted that BBC News has no ads, how about LATimes and New York Times? Both are featuring ads elegantly with clean designs. And, PLEASE, you don’t have to use Flash for everywhere right?

2) Display relevant ads. Google’s AdSense says it all - Put a PDA ad beside your PDA review, place a health supplement ad beside the latest lab release of Vitamin A effects on the human body. Hardly groundbreaking techniques, simply common sense. If your software can’t do it, get a human being to. Think $2k would pay that guy well. I’ll do it for the same amount of peanuts, eagerly.

3) Get the classifieds back. Imagine how useful the Classifieds will be if they are online and searchable. You can jack up the costs of advertising and I think advertisers will pay quite willingly. I mean, it’s a dream come true for both advertisers and users alike. Think you can have profits so many times more than the current subcriptions charges.

4) Combine (2) and (3). Voila. Display relevant Classifieds ads besides your news/editorial/forum/extra contents. Think about it, the relevancy of the ad placement will definetly earn you so much more. How come no one has ever thought of that before? Makes mental note to patent it.

In conclusion, stop this subscription drive. It has earned you so much bad PR, and it’s a senseless business idea. Suppose you don’t get the minimum subscriber base, which advertiser will give a *tweep* about STI? Stay free, regain your lost corperate goodwill, refine your site, return us our online, searchable Classifieds and make your ads relevant. I think that will keep you, STI, afloat and profitable for a long time.