Friday, June 25, 2021

Yesterday was a busy day for me. Beginning early at 8am, a meeting was set up for me to evaluate an industrial training student, Muhammad Nabil who was stationed at the Medical Radiation Monitoring Section (Bahagian Kawalselia Radiasi Perubatan - BKRP) of the Ministry of Health, Malaysia. Not sure when was the last time I did this, but I remembered going to USIM for a similar thing. So, I wasn't sure how the meeting should go and I will just improvise as it goes along. Introduce myself to the officers at BKRP, Syarul Iman and Mohd Reduan and they too introduced themselves. I asked the student to go ahead with his presentation since time is limited. This was followed by Q&A and I also invited the officers to give their thoughts. Finally I thanked the officers for letting our students have the learning opportunity there. Below is a pic.

The reason there was a rush for the above morning meeting is that I am scheduled to get my second dose of Covid-19 vaccination later that morning. So right after that session, my son drove me to the teaching hospital of UPM. The place for vaccination was different from the first one. This time one does not need to queue in a line but rather we simply register ourselves at a counter to get our number, later to be called in the designated ward (different from the first).

After the second dose is administered, our MySejahtera app was updated and we were given the electronic certification of the vaccination (see pic below).

Back home, had my lunch and rested a little before beginning the next task of the day i.e. hosting the Physics Departmental Seminar. This time, I invited  a guest from Universiti Malaya, Dr. Norhasliza Yusof to give the talk.

It was on an intriguing subject of nuclear astrophysics, particularly on stellar evolution, which I know very little about. Met virtually her local supervisor, Prof. Hasan Abu Kassim, a long-time friend whom I have not seen for quite some time. We discuss a bit before the seminar, the frustrations of our local theoretical physicists and his soon-to-be retirement.

The talk with the Q&A went on for more an hour and a half. The recording of the talk can be found below.

Immediately after the seminar, I rested since my arm where the shot was administered, hurt a little bit. This morning was a bit feverish and so I just slept the whole way through. Right now, I'm struggling to be alert with the hope to do some work.

I posted about my vaccination on social media with my pics below.

Apparently, somebody got offended by this post (I knew the person was referring to my post since unlike the post of others, I simply said "Alhamdulillah, done" - not exaggerating about the vaccination). I was upset on reading it but after awhile I have a sense of pity for the person. The person is probably frustrated of not yet being vaccinated but so was I before I got my appointment and so too of many others. My immediate thoughts, thereafter, is that one should not allow social media to dictate too much our life. Just simply scroll past most of the posts on social media and just take note what one is interested in. If there is a need, just unfollow or worse, unfriend. Most social media posts are rants that are not worth to ponder on too much. These days, I use social media merely to record significant events of my life and to put some interesting items that I hope to refer to later. In particular, would like to post only on nice and useful things. And I suggest others do the same; flood the social media with better posts than just rants.