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Sunday, February 28, 2010
national service in conclusion part iv (final)
to conclude this chapter, i'm absolutely grateful for national service. it saved my life.
my life had been on a downward spiral around the time i enlisted - everything was failing, not unlike the great depression. national service caught me, gave me something to live for and thrust me upwards, perhaps beyond my imagination.
i didn't start well - i was a wreck. like most others i waited for instructions, carried them out in exchange for the privileges that had been take for granted all along. i didn't put effort into what i was doing, because i didn't see the meaning in what i was doing. like turning on a hydrant so there'll be water. so? later i read that it was a form of autism - the inability to link actions and consequences.
the chance to do good in the community suddenly put everything into perspective. whatever we were trained for made sense, and mattered. what has become second nature in trainings and drills, when put into real life, translated into "real good" deeds.
i'm not sure; never will be, if these would all hold true had i served somewhere else. but i was here, this part is real. the organisation that i expected so little from has given me so much: purpose, hope, and my life. it's as good as having converted all the negative energy i possessed into positive form.
it has given me an education on what matters. i never appreciated all that until an accidental chance of comparison. beyond that imperfect facade lied a people who worked effectively. we were happy, we made friends, and we did good. it's getting a lot when you've never asked for any of that.
thank you, and i'll be back.
horizontal at 11:48 PM
Thursday, February 25, 2010
national service in conclusion part iii
one of the questions i get asked the most when people know where i served, is how the imbalanced racial proportion was affecting me. let's not mention which race because i'm sure you all know, and just in case this is picked up by any ministry's monthly monitoring of internet chatter.
the question is based on the assumption that i would be affected. to be honest, this was a small concern because it has been good time since my last immersion in a multi-racial environment. fellow citizens loitering in void decks, talking loudly and wearing caps which you can see the rear half of their heads from don't help.
but this turned out to be the least of all concerns. again i emphasize i was lucky in having good company throughout the two years however diverse our backgrounds may be. i gained access to a part of society which wasn't exactly inaccessible, but with high barriers of entry, which is essential in understanding this country better.
it was fun because there were little politics. what remained were things i could live with, or at least bear within a limited period knowing that NS is itself, a limited period. there're higher order politics in other segments of course, which i was briefly embroiled in. it showed me how different the worlds are and how scary the other one is. for once, the grass was greener on my side.
furthermore, 2 years in LEP and 2 years here had shown me that the chinese, however removed from their ancestral villages, are the ones who's most capable of starting conflicts. there's a good reason why chinatowns all over the world, especially in the third world, are being torched and rioted against.
i probably never expected myself to say this, but despite whatever prejudice you may have about this organisation, it was the one entity which made me feel most at home. more than any other enviornment that i've been in. perhaps it's because things didn't matter as much, but think at a deeper level it did. probably more.
horizontal at 11:27 PM
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
national service in conclusion part ii
having been a recruit for only 4 days, my next 6 months was spent as a SCT. if this isn't anything new now, it's interesting to note that when i was an SCT, this rank didn't exist in the army, when it had existed for 10 years at my place. in retrospect, it wasn't any much of a privilege. it felt like 6 months of recruit life.
which wasn't bad at all. because things in past always seem better than they really were. there was never another period of time in my life when syrup tasted so good, when the freedom to roam was so relished after 5.30pm every monday to thursday, when friday prayers at the mosque mattered so much (differently to different people).
i've been lucky because the people i've met in NS were generally nice. the gradual interaction with people further removed from me helped, but whatever the occasion, it was interesting. a conversation i had with a friend 2 days ago was a reminder of this fact: that the side effects of NS (less jobless teenagers, less crime, the ultimate equaliser) are far more prominent than the primary purpose of defence, if effective at all.
i've been lucky because i never knew it was possible to serve NS in a place 10 minutes from my home. it's 9 bus stops and the record is 7 minutes. definitely a godsent compared to people who live in pioneer and changi who are posted to changi and tuas naval bases, respectively.
the luckiest thing of all, i suppose, was the opportunity to do good. i'm extremely glad that i was in a 1st division fire station - not hidden in a remote corner of singapore, wondering if the work you do ever matters. i'm sure mine did.
stories of old folks who live and die alone, who remain undiscovered until they start to smell, aren't statistics or page 5 titles in shin min. they're tragedies which happen, which you'll never realise until you're made to face it.
traffic accidents aren't realistically portrayed in television and movies other than the final destination. these are moments when everything you do matter. how quickly you reach, how quickly you work and how carefully you work. when it strikes you that whatever you do may not have worked, there's really a sinking feeling.
the incident ground is one place when people don't keng anymore. most are courageous, and if you consider the risk some are placing themselves in, it's really commendable. when i came back from bintan, i found one of my firemen with burns because - he was trapped by falling debris while fighting a big fire. and i wondered why, of all days, was i on leave.
people do want to go to fires.
horizontal at 10:35 PM
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
national service in conclusion part i
having lived in singapore for long enough, there is a somewhat standard vision of what NS was going to be - the scenes in army daze, nonsensical publications in section 959 (singapore) of the library, and in general, societal expectations.
so for two years i would be running through a jungle, wearing a green uniform, staying in a bunk, polishing boots and cleaning rifles all the time. somewhere in the middle, i also decided that i should pick up a bit of bahasa melayu. there, a clear picture of what to expect was formed.
eventually, only the last part came true.
for most of my NS life i slept on top of a staircase landing, within 5 metres of a sliding pole. i wore a blue uniform. i hardly polished anything, having been a recruit for only 4 days.
people didn't know you could serve your NS with the life saving force. i knew, but it was the kind of thing that i thought would never happen to me. there must be something wrong with you for you to be there.
it was a blessing in disguise, because now i have come to realise how much i abhor guns. maybe the computers at central manpower base managed to pick it out!
the first and foremost feeling i have about the past 22 months, is this: i had actually been on a fire engine, gone to fires, been involved in situations most people see only on tv (and some, believe me, are more dramatic than fiction), and did good.
compare that to the standard vision of NS. it's totally different. more interesting, more rewarding. and unlike 99% of the people i know from the armed departments, i did not feel fucked up from my toes to the eyeballs.
15 days as a civilian, and it's still unconceivable that i did some of the things that i did.
horizontal at 10:33 PM
Wednesday, February 03, 2010
the last decade it shall remain
barely 2 entries ago i said that i was deciding on the future of this blog. i was undecided until this morning, when blogger made the decision for me:
Dear FTP user:
You are receiving this e-mail because one or more of your blogs at Blogger.com are set up to publish via FTP. We recently announced a planned shut-down of FTP support on Blogger Buzz (the official Blogger blog), and wanted to make sure you saw the announcement. We will be following up with more information via e-mail in the weeks ahead, and regularly updating a blog dedicated to this service shut-down here: http://blogger-ftp.blogspot.com/.
The full text of the announcement at Blogger Buzz follows.
Last May, we discussed a number of challenges facing Blogger users who relied on FTP to publish their blogs. FTP remains a significant drain on our ability to improve Blogger: only .5% of active blogs are published via FTP — yet the percentage of our engineering resources devoted to supporting FTP vastly exceeds that. On top of this, critical infrastructure that our FTP support relies on at Google will soon become unavailable, which would require that we completely rewrite the code that handles our FTP processing.
Three years ago we launched Custom Domains to give users the simplicity of Blogger, the scalability of Google hosting, and the flexibility of hosting your blog at your own URL. Last year's post discussed the advantages of custom domains over FTP and addressed a number of reasons users have continued to use FTP publishing. (If you're interested in reading more about Custom Domains, our Help Center has a good overview of how to use them on your blog.) In evaluating the investment needed to continue supporting FTP, we have decided that we could not justify diverting further engineering resources away from building new features for all users.
For that reason, we are announcing today that we will no longer support FTP publishing in Blogger after March 26, 2010. We realize that this will not necessarily be welcome news for some users, and we are committed to making the transition as seamless as possible. To that end:
We are building a migration tool that will walk users through a migration from their current URL to a Blogger-managed URL (either a Custom Domain or a Blogspot URL) that will be available to all users the week of February 22. This tool will handle redirecting traffic from the old URL to the new URL, and will handle the vast majority of situations.
We will be providing a dedicated blog and help documentation. Blogger team members will also be available to answer questions on the forum, comments on the blog, and in a few scheduled conference calls once the tool is released.
We have a number of big releases planned in 2010. While we recognize that this decision will frustrate some users, we look forward to showing you the many great things on the way. Thanks for using Blogger.
Regards,
Rick Klau
Blogger Product Manager
Google
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043
in case you never noticed, my URL is not a blogspot one. it is provided by junwei since 2004. the main purpose of having a non-blogspot URL is to break through the great firewall of china. since my political stance has changed considerably since then, this is no longer a valid reason. the effect remains, though, that is me being part of the minority using FTP to upload content.
then comes the part about blogging being last decade. at an age when facebook can well be an internet browser on its own. there're definitely lots of things which can't be said on facebook notes, but these things shouldn't be said by me anyway. i'll still be writing, but perhaps on more sensitive issues, you'll no longer know it's me.
since blogger stops supporting FTP on 26 march, i'll conclude this blog by ending with a series to conclude my NS life.
this episode is an imitation of my life in the past 2 years. i'm undecided, then something happens, and like being guided by an invisible hand i move in a certain direction, not knowing if it's oblivion.
horizontal at 6:18 PM
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