Clinic in Mantin and Balcony Visitors

My other half has started working today in a clinic in Mantin despite her impaired hearing on the left ear. As much as I was hoping that this will be unnecessary, we need the extra income, particularly in this period when I don't have part-time teaching. The clinic is a new one owned by another doctor and my other half is just doing part-time stints during the day. Yesterday, we went to have a look at the clinic in order for my other half know the way to get there. The clinic officially opens today.

Also yesterday, we received some unexpected wildlife visitors to the balcony of my eldest son's room. I guess this is due to a green area at a junction nearby our place has been cleared, leaving only a few trees. In a way, I feel bad for them.

Today, they made a repeat visit to the balcony. I do hope they won't be our regular visitors and that they get a better, safer place somewhere.

They also went over to our neighbour's shack and was trying to find food, I guess, since we saw them eating the catfood there.

I hope they won't cause any menace or started to enter our homes.

Leaving School and Musical Adventures

Have been indoors mainly this week and as I was organizing things, saw an old folder that was used to keep important documents, following traits of my late father (with little success).

Examined its contents and found my school leaving certificates. At school, I was a very shy and quiet person, not socializing that much. You can perhaps see signs of this in my school leaving certificate of my co-curriculum activities (very few).

Perhaps the next one will surprise many (found together with my school leaving certificate).

This is for winning a 'singing competition' or rather a talent competition that we participated in. We, T-Blues Band, we called ourselves, comprised of Ayub Los (lead guitar), Amiruddin Zain (second guitar, vocals), Abdul Malek Eusoff (bass) and myself on the drums (also Khor Tze Ping as guest keyboardist), actually competed twice. The first one, we played two songs; an original by Ayub Los (can't remember the title) and Muddy Waters' "Walking in the Park". We did not win then. It was the first time that I get my hands on a real drum set (before that, I was just drumming in my mind or at best, on a table). 

The second time, we played songs that have more commercial appeal. The Malay song was relatively unknown song from Discovery called Malam Sepi. Right after we played this song, it sort went popular for a while at the school. The english song, we played next, is Ten Years After's "My Baby Left Me". For these, we won the competition (I think it was the group category, unsure if there were other categories). Why we chose blues/rock n roll genre, I can't remember why; but I knew that we wanted to be different. 

The next document in the folder was the school leaving certificate from Daws Road High School, the school that I went to for matriculation education in Adelaide.

As you can see, I remained the person with quiet personality (even more quiet). The photo below is my class with Mr. Hopkins as our class teacher.

I continued to pursue my musical interests after school. Played drums during the term holidays while I was at University of Adelaide.

One special jam session I had was with Mustaffa Ramly, who visited Mile End, Adelaide in 1987. We played Police and Dire Straits music. Mustaffa later went on to be the guitarist who played with Zainal Abidin. Other musician-students that I had jammed with then was Harith (don't know his full name, but partially visible in picture below), Anuar Kasim. Pic with Mustaffa is shown below.

Back in UPM, sometimes I was asked to play guitar for some events but I was never really good at it.

I have now laid my guitar to rest (somewhere in the store).

64

Yesterday evening, I wrote in FB (recall Islamic day begins at sunset - see here)

"When I'm 64 in Hijri calendar
  What I was made for, is to surrender
  Not the song others put asunder"

Yes, I've grown much older. No, I'm not a poet. Words often can't really describe what I feel inside, but only through words can I convey my feelings.

In many ways, I do reflect on whether I've done my duty in this world. I would like to consider myself as a scientist, probably an average one. Some may disagree, of course, and they are entitled to their opinions, but I will surely challenge them on some points. However for me, over are the days of arguing, particularly, if it is over in the social media. As one grows older, one values more the peace of mind. From my past experience, there will always be people that dislike you for no real reason. Usually I can read the body language of others, bosses, colleagues and even students. For most parts, I just walk away from them and pray that we will not cross path too much. I will try to keep myself busy, contributing in any way that I can, even in situations where I'm being disliked. Finally, I tend to seclude myself, so that I won't get in the way of others. Doing that, I miss however, a stimulating environment, discussing with others on one's work or on recent developments.

I consider most tend to conflate self-worth with ego (including the person who writes this), which is rather unfortunate. The unpleasant thing is when one finds the situation where one is trying to inflate his/her self-worth by degrading others, disguised under the banner of criticisms (whether it is true or not). This has been how most knowledge being developed throughout history, with a touch of arrogance. In a recent conference, I do feel my presentation was criticised indirectly by throwing terms like ad-hockery and appeal to authority. My reply to this, would be good luck in trying to escape from these, particularly for quantum theory. So seclusion to me, while not being a good solution, seems to be  'natural'.

Enough rambling. Today, we went to a wedding of my other half's nephew in KL. Some pics:

End of Current Duties

Monday this week, was the final day for us to submit marks for our courses. The few days before was then essentially for us to complete everything, totalling up marks and enter the appropriate percentages for the course assessments and finally keying in the marks. My colleagues informed me then I could export a csv file from some Excel worksheet and import them into the marks module. However, I have always felt uneasy doing this (particularly if we know there might be differences in the fields or data not updated) and I preferred keying them one-by-one by myself manually into the system. In a way, I keep a check of what goes into the system. Of course, there is always the possibility of doing mistakes out of say, being tired (as my colleague suggested). So, I was wide awake that Sunday night (and early Monday morning) trying to finish up everything (including scanning samples of exam scripts).

Had about two to three hours of sleep that day. By the evening, I told my other half that I need to take pain killers to ease the pain. So the following day (Tuesday), I was essentially drowsy and was unable to do much.

For Wednesday, we have already planned to go to my former university to collect the supply of medicine which has almost finished. It is almost always when I visited the university health centre, the doctor that I was meeting, changed to someone else; it does not matter much since all the records are in the system they kept. For some reason, I thought I was supposed to do my blood test that day but the doctor told me to defer this to April. So I was there only briefly.

Today, I further completed some tasks of signing documents for the teaching portfolio. The only thing that's left for me to do is to return the exam scripts  to the Exams Unit. I will have to do this at some other convenient time. After that, I will be considered unemployed.

Tomorrow, I will have relatives coming to our house since there will be a wedding we need to go to during the weekend. Besides that, my youngest has already taken up a part-time job at the nearby Aeon mall.

Final Phase of Marking Varia

I'm currently n the final phase of marking. Recall that our final exams started only last week (see this post). Next Monday will be the deadline for keying our marks (in total) for the courses we are teaching. I told my colleague that in my former university, we have around of two weeks to complete our marking. Thus, the window that we currently have is much shorter. As a result, the marking that we went through in the past week or so, is very intense. Many times, I feel light headed, eyes all teary and my body all tensed up. I avoided taking pain killers to make sure I can stay awake to finish the marking. Hopefully by tomorrow, I will end my marking (with my group of Linear Algebra being the last) and the weekend will be simply for keying in the marks, God willing.

The job does not end with marking. After this, we will be occupied with filling up with OBE forms, scanning samples and preparing our teaching portfolio for the current semester. Today, while my colleague and I were switching scripts, I told her that I was caught by surprise the level of details that the staff needs to go through. I mentioned when I first taught at the university, I was preparing the exam in the same way as in my former university, namely allowing students to have a choice of questions for them to answer in the exam. To me, this should benefit the students to be able to choose the topics that they understood better and that having choices also reflect real life. However, having this flexibility caused difficulties for me to fill up the OBE form where teaching aims are more rigid. I guess there are pros and cons on this matter. My own stance is essentially teaching and learning are creative processes and making things rigid might stifle the creative process.

Update on my other half's health: The specialist in HTJ, Seremban told my other half that what she is experiencing could possibly be Meniere's disease, a rare disease with no known cure. She has been asked to go for MRI to observe details of her inner ear. Currently, she has to cope with the echoing 'noises' in her left ear and also the problem of balance. When will the MRI be done, is not known yet. If it is scheduled too late, we may have to opt to get it done at a private hospital (and pay higher expenses).

My near future: I still seek whatever opportunities that are available for me. I may have to return to part-time teaching with the current university. In some way, I do wish I can help in the activities of International Year of Quantum Science and Technology in some small way. My younger colleagues will take lead of course. Recently, I saw Dr. Yap was named CTO of a start-up in Singapore (see here). I toyed around with a similar idea and suggested this to my younger colleague at my former university, even if it may seem remote to be realised. I have been listening to many talks on such related matters. In a way, we need to take risks and be more determined in our actions. Well, small steps first.

Another Day At Ara Damansara

Today we were at Ara Damansara Medical Centre for my other half's appointment. She had another audiometry test, which is longer than the last one due to more elaborate testing (see figure below). After two weeks of taking steroids, the curve that corresponds to the nerves seem to be responding well. However her hearing is still impaired according to what the doctor said as conducting loss. We were thrown a few medical terms for which I write here: grommet, tympanosclerosis, otosclerosis. From the doctor's brief study of the curves drawn by the audiometry tests, my other half is probably suffering from otosclerosis. The treatment for this probably involves surgery and the doctor has referred us to the public hospital in Seremban this coming Monday, as the surgery will be more invasive than the previous one. We can no longer afford such treatment at the private hospital.

(Source: https://dizziness-and-balance.com/disorders/hearing/otoscler.html)

My other half joked a little about her getting these rare medical cases: first, the spontaneous cerebrospinal fluid leak which rarely happens without any form of head injury, and second, otosclerosis where her impaired hearing occurs at low frequencies (usual impaired hearing involves higher frequencies). As much as I want to be humoured, this is no joking matter. Both of these will cause further financial stress on me and today I also heard about another financial worry. With her impaired hearing, she could no longer perform her normal doctor duties and any possible near-term locum seems to be out of question. Note that she has already closed her clinic in Rembau years back and the usual clinics where she sometimes did locum have mostly closed down. The only means of help to alleviate financial stresses has been my part-time teaching duties, which I will probably continue in the coming April semester.

Final Exams and Marking Extravaganza

This week we had final exams for the two courses I am teaching, namely Quantitative Methods and Data Analysis I (despite the fancy name, it is essentially Applied Calculus), which is on Monday, and Linear Algebra which is on Wednesday. Both subjects had six different groups; I taught two groups for QM (this is what it is popularly called there by students and staff and it took me quite awhile to get used to this, since QM in my head, automatically translates to Quantum Mechanics) and one group for Linear Algebra. Each group may be of different size, typically over sixty. I had 87 and 105 for QM and 68 for Linear Algebra. So in order to conduct an exam for all the six groups for each group simultaneously, we do need a big exam hall. Indeed, they had LY3 (which stands for Ling Yun 3 - unsure what the name refers to), with the ground floor capable of accommodating around 600 students. I was told there were other exam halls, which I have not gone to as yet.

Exams are conducted in strict fashion and are administered by a central Exam Unit and invigilators are discouraged from staying put or looked at the mobile phones during the exam. I had already a little experience before while I was teaching at Physics Department there, but I only had a small group then. For this semester, it was a real learning experience dealing with large number of students. They also implemented that uniform marking across different groups with each lecturer marking specific questions for the exam. So for the previous midterm exam, I got a huge surprise of having roughly 1000 scripts to look through (roughly 500 for each subject). I was terribly slow then given my first experience of such large number of scripts to mark, and we had to prepare for our lessons as well. Then, I also had the conference in Krabi, Thailand which sort of slowed down my marking (absence of a week). For this final exam, my colleague lecturers spared me from looking into many questions (I can't thank you enough). Also, with no teaching left, I was able to mark faster now. I have already switched bundles of scripts with my colleagues and tomorrow, God willing, I will be doing another exchange.

So for this week, my condition is very much like the cats below with lyrics of Adele's songs "Hello from the other side" in my head.

Difficult Start for 2025

Well, we are now in 2025. I posted this on my FB; whatever importance that may be to anyone. For me, it is just another passage in time, and I don't think it is any more different from 2024. I will still be working hard to support the family as a whole.

Just before the New Year Eve, I received the news of my son Izhar was diagnosed of having a swollen heart. We asked him to come home for a further check-up at a private hospital near our place. Over there, he did an echocardiogram test (an MRI test would be more detailed but it was just too expensive for me). What would be the cause of the problem? Most probably being stressed out by too much work. I had a similar problem way back in 2011. Perhaps such incidents should be a reminder for the employer; as much as one would like to squeeze as much work from an employee, his/her health may be put to risk.

The check-up at the hospital (particularly without an appointment) almost always end up at least spending almost a half-day of waiting. I had plenty on my mind with so many unfinished tasks. I developed another bad episode of back pain during the new year. Yesterday, I had to take pain killers to relieve the pain (and slept most of the day through and still feeling drowsy). So far, I have not complained about my back pain and have grown used to it, but out of prolonged sitting in the last few weeks, the pain worsened and I just can't ignore it.

The whole family was actually back together briefly for the New Year holiday, but I was not able to spend much time with my sons due to work (or resting from back pain). Mainly spend it with my cats.

Here is Stephanie (the oldest cat in the house), recovering from a minor surgery to remove an inflamed swelling from her body.

I was hoping that I get better news for the New Year but it seems they are not forthcoming.