Fwd: URGENT: Platelets & Prayers Needed in Singapor

Subject: Fwd: URGENT: Platelets & Prayers Needed in Singapor

hey peeps

ookay i don't mass mail very often! A friend's friend's dad is in need of blood O+ (which is very common right), must be from the male species only. so if you're a female and reading this, just forward to your guy friends ya! much thanks in advance for being a blessing! :)

Details:-

Patient Name: TAN POK SUAN

Where: 7th Floor, HAEMOTOLOGY & STEM CELL CENTRE, MT. ELIZABETH

Preferably : O+ Blood & Male

Just inform the potential platelet donors to tell the people at 7th Floor that they would like to donate platelets to Tan Pok Suan and they will tell you the procedure.

God bless!

Random thoughts at the end of week two

Just a random thought occured to me during breakfast today.

There are people around who KPKB about a lot of things, but do not lift a finger to help.

Basically 'All Talk and No Action'.

Well as they say 'Empty Vessels Make the Most Noise'...

Something I am really beginning to appreciate especially after taking up The Important Responsibility in hall.

By the way, going down later today to support one of my friends in The Organisation. His Corps turns 10 today :)
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Some other random thoughts:

This friend of mine passed out from the Officer's Course only one year after me. Yet till this day, he still addresses me as 'Sir', a gesture which I do not demand but I appreciate it nevertheless. Compare to the younger ones 4 or 5 batches younger. Back then respect for seniority was prized, I don't know what happened along the way.

Come to think of it, about the officers who I trained under as a cadet. If they were to resume their service in The Organisation, will still be calling them Sir / Ma'am even though I'm of higher rank than them now. But sometimes, it's not about what it is on the shoulder, but about the experience that they have had. Therefore we must have mutual respect for one another. Otherwise, take an example from SAF. The 2WO will not respect the 2LT just because of his rank. But if the 2LT will respect the 2WO for his experience and wisdom gained from his 20-odd years of service, I am sure most 2WO will at least give face to him... Of course there are black sheep officers who come out from That Training School cocky and all that. Will they earn the respect of subordinates?

There are a variety of reasons why someone is below you in the pecking order. He could have not had sufficient experience or qualifications. Or he may not have 'apple polished' his way up as well as others. However, everyone is special in his or her own way. Everyone has his or her own way to contribute to the organisation, if you can find a way to motivate them and harness that potential in them.

Even in that particular district in The Organisation, there are a few officers being sidelined, jokingly termed the "Long Term Captains". I can't help but wonder if they actually have the passion to contribute, just that there has been some offence taken in the past which causes their attitude to be like this now...Could it be that now, they are like this simply because they have given up trying?

(I begin to sense I'm being overly optimistic here... but anyway)

We do not salute the man but the rank. But everyone is unique, everyone is special and we respect that. Respect begets respect. The golden rule: do unto others as you would others do unto you. Law of attraction (those who watch The Secret will know). I've seen it come true in my life in more than one way.

I am convinced that my life's purpose is to do something that benefits people. And ever since I have discovered this purpose, I daresay I have had a paradigm shift... and now I see a bigger picture... having said that, I still have lots of room for improvement... and it is my prayer that God will help me in this , for it is not by my strength but His.
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And this is for you, my senior in JC and now hall, you know who you are:

You have meant well for me during the period when my life had no direction. And I had inadverently clashed with you right here in this blog. But at the end of it all you meant well. I was simply not teachable during that period of time... and i am sorry if I had hurt you in any way. God bless.

On JCRC

It's been just a week since the elections have passed and boy, we've been through a lot of discussion, we feel every bit in the job even though it's still a few day before we officially take over. haha

Some random thoughts about my Organisations

A question was posed to me recently about my committments in general. Currently, besides my academic, church and hall committments, I have two Organisations that regular readers of my blog should know.

My involvement in both Organisations can be as heavy or as light as I want it to be. Of course, it's foolhardy to just dive into it for the sake of it. Before taking on any new project, basic economics demands we apply the principle of opportunity cost. Can the time spent be put to better use? Always ask this question first.

Also another economics principle, return on investment. What are the gains (in terms of personal satisfaction, such as knowing that what I have done has helped another person, or my own personal development? Caveat: not monetary gains of course..)

[[DISCLAIMER: I am no econs major, and my understanding of Econs is pretty basic, so pardon me if I applied certain theories wrongly]]

With these in mind...
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I have formalised my plan to call it a day in The Other Organisation. Strange to say, there are no feelings of loss whatsoever. It's just a feeling of emptiness as to whether it was the right choice to join The Other Organisation in the first place.

No doubt, I have been exposed to many new things which put me in good stead for my dealings with teachers especially now in my role in The Organisation. But after all the instances whereby my effort was put to waste (zero return of investment), I think it's been a very expensive exposure indeed.

For these couple of years in particular, my later half of my studies in NUS, I will not be active at all due to my academic committments... and also due to the fact that I am taking up a key position in hall. After that, I would start working and it would be a whole new challenge to keep on top of my working schedule. Probably I won't even be able to continue then, so might as well beat my retreat now and focus on the more critical stuff.

So, principle of opportunity cost and return on investment applies here. Nuff said...

So, I have cut back on one of my 'outside' activities. I am now left with The Organisation...

I received an email from my superior recently that was very much a pat on the back for my hard work. Nothing is more important than knowing that you've done a good job and others have benefited from it.

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It's okay if certain 'old people's mindset' cannot change... that is why younger ones are getting frustrated and leaving the organisation (notice it's not in caps, hence it does not refer to any particular Organisation). I do not find myself in this situation.. yet. But I couldn't help but wonder. One of my colleagues with sterling service has decided to call it quits.

In order for any organisation to change, we have to move with the times. The head of The Other Organisation once said to us, one of the excuses she hates the most is: "It was done this way last time". My formation RSM always asked us.."Last time, policemen wear shorts".

We should not follow what was done in the past blindly, rather we use it as a reference and brainstorm how it can be improved for this day and age.

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I saw a very interesting disclaimer on another blog that goes somewhere along the lines of:

"This author advises everyone that blogs are worse than porn. Therefore... If what I had said is untrue in any way, this author deeply regrets all distress and inconvenience caused, and advises everyone to go to porn sites instead for better entertainment."

Well... quite true to a certain extent... but i won't opt for 'better entertainment', thank you. I think I should write a disclaimer along the lines of 'if you don't like / don't agree, you are always free to hit Alt-F4 and go back to what you were doing before this'.

Whither the B Drive?

C:\> a:

A:\> b:
Invalid drive specification

A:\>


Most of us who use computers nowadays are familiar with the drive lettering system. The hard disk which stores the operating system and main applications is the C: drive and, in most systems, the hard disk which stores the data is the D: drive. The CD-ROM (or DVD for those more high-tech systems) is known as the E: drive (or basically the next letter after the last hard disk drive. USB thumbdrives, flash memory sticks when inserted take on yet another designation, probably the F: or G: drive depening on what else is already in the system.

In networks, a user’s ‘networks space’ is designated the H: drive and now, the network drive letters run all the way through to Z:; each one has its own purpose which for all intents and purposes, as lay users we do not need to know.

One wonders, why does it all start with the C: drive? Why not A: or B:? One must look to the early days of computing for the answer…

In the good old days, when the (510KB?) 5 ¼” floppy was being used (the high density one was the 1.2MB, the 720KB/1.44MB 3 ½” floppy was still unheard of, much less the Zip drives which by themselves are nearing their demise)… hard disk drives were still quite rare. By the way, instead of the immense 20GB hard disks we have nowadays, hard disk sizes back then were still in the range of 100 – 200MB. Most computers had two floppy disk drives, one for the OS (MS-DOS, DR-DOS or PC-DOS in those days. No Windows yet, that invention came with Windows 3.0, followed by Windows 3.1 which still depended on MS-DOS up to 6.22, which was superseded by Windows 95 in 1996?) One would insert the boot up disk into one of the floppy drives and of course, the other floppy drive was required for data, which in those days was WordPerfect for documents, Lotus 1-2-3 for spreadsheets and dBase for databases, and printouts were from dot matrix printers. Colourful printouts from inkjet printers were unheard of. RAM of 4MB was considered luxurious. Back then CPU speeds were the 8086 (XT), 80286, 80386, 80486 (which included the 486-SX and 486-DX), then the Pentium which superseded the 80x86 classification, and as we all know now, Pentium Pro, Pentium II, Pentium MMX, Pentium III, Pentium 4 and after that a range of processor chips by Intel's competitors.

Anyway, as you guessed, the boot up disk drive was the A: drive and the other floppy drive was the B: drive. When hard disks became commonplace and the OS started to be installed on the hard disk, computers started to ship with only one floppy drive. By then, the 3 ½” floppy began to supersede the 5 ¼” floppy. For a while, computers had one of each floppy drive for compatibility reasons. However, after a while the 5 ¼” drive was phased out totally. There would only be one floppy drive, the 3 ½” floppy which was designated the A: drive. If you are kiasu, you have two. Anyway, by the early 2000s the floppy drives started to be superseded by Zip drives and then, thumbdrives, Flash drives and what have you. As of this writing, the laptop I am using has a removable 3 ½” floppy drive which has not seen any use recently. Most of the data which I used to keep on diskettes have been transferred to my thumbdrive, and the diskettes trashed.

Nowadays, new computers do not even ship with a floppy drive, meaning simply that the use of the designations A: and B: is moribund.

I wonder whether there will be any new convention to eventually reassign the letters A: and B: to some other drive, once the older generation which used floppy disks retire and pass on. Only time will tell. By then, probably the convention of using C: for the main OS disk will have stuck for so long that people will still continue to use it. Perhaps there will come a time when the ‘legend of the lost A: and B: drive’ abounds… but by then, perhaps hard disks, and even computers themselves are already superseded by some nanotechnological device.

Remember cassette tapes? Already been superseded by CDs, themselves superseded by MP3 players. I wonder what nanotechnological device will the technologists of the future use. One that combines the function of a laptop, MP3 player, phone, portable hard disk (a souped up, much less problematic version of the iPhone, most importantly Not dependant on a computer to sync with). And this device will be no bigger than a phonecard, can just fit in a wallet. Just half a century ago, with the big mainframe computers which filled a whole room, laptop computers were a dream. Even the tall servers the size of a cupboard were referred to as ‘minicomputers’, and desktop computers ‘microcomputers’.