Do More, Talk Less

As Ramadhan 1446 approaches, I'm minimizing my interactions with FB, shying away from the public. So my apologies for not responding to any tags, friend requests or messages there. Need some time off to deal with my own worries.

In a previous post, I consider myself as an average scientist, trying to better myself, even after retirement. Indeed, I should do more and talk less. There is just too much noise in the social media and not much that really helps one there. So, one of the things I wanted to do now, is to write more on my blogs. As an average scientist, perhaps there would be some good values and experiences in my writing that others can learn from. Having said this, I'm weary about useless or unnecessary content that has appeared in social media and I would not want to be pressured unnecessarily to put out content (which easily can degrade to 'artificial content'. I will try to write when there is something really meaningful for me to say.

I have resurrected my Equatorial Frequencies blog with a post on Real Numbers and Continuum. Previously I use this blog to dump links of articles on the arXiv that I find interesting. At some point (see this post), the arXiv administrators limit the period of catch-up and later even restrict the amount of download (possibly triggering automated download prohibitive measures). Due to restriction, I froze this blog for some time until the said post. I have another wordpress blog that I have kept. They are both technical blogs due to their LaTeX rendering capabilities. So in a way, I could just keep one blog and close the other. But I decided to keep them both. Equatorial Frequencies will deal with topics that are related to my (current) research. Ketchup Spills will be on everything else (random topics) that is a distant away from my research. Obviously, such division will not be sharp and will be time-dependent. I have just posted Infinitesimals and Nonstandard Analysis over in Ketchup Spills, which I know very little about. The post was however related to the earlier Equatorial Frequencies post, coming from my extraneous readings.

Will I have enough materials to post in both blogs? Well, what I can say is that over the years, I have accumulated much reading materials that I thought I want to go through but I did not have the time. As a retiree, I suppose I can do these readings now, modulo my part-time duties (if I get the job). How frequent will these be updated? I do not know but I hope at least monthly, I can write something meaningful. Certainly going through technical materials is a tough thing to do. Even for the historical stuff for the two updates mentioned above, seems to be a difficult read. It was my mistake to start reading John Bell's 90-page article (150+ page here); I was terribly slow in reading this. Articles discussing history also is harder for me to make notes on since much of them dwells on textual analysis with plenty of quotes. For mathematical ones, it is probably easier to make notes but it will be harder to digest the technical materials. Another thing that I have noticed is that articles on history at times seem like bashing someone rather personally - I try to distant myself away from such articles, if I can. Perhaps more on these in a different post, together with problems of academia and ego.

I do have another blog Acu Frekuensi which is in Malay. This is to cater more on topics of probably more local interest. As for this blog, it will be main personal stuff. So, this is how I will write more. Hopefully out of them, will grow more serious pieces of writing.

PS. We will be fasting on Sunday, March 2nd 2025.

Hospital Visits and Youngest's Birthday

Rolling back a week ago, my youngest was applying for admission of BSc degree. He could not find his SPM certificate; he took his SPM examination during the pandemic. So we had to take a trip to Examinations Board in Putrajaya to collect a copy. We had to park at Alamanda since the parking near the building is always full. Both him and my other half walked to the building while I wait at Zus Coffee in Alamanda (I easily get tired due to my back pain). They were there at the Examinations Board for only about half an hour and then they walked back to Alamanda. Being at the shopping mall, we thought of buying our lunch there purposely to try something new. There was a restaurant called A'Decade and got our packed food there. The food was good.

Last Tuesday, we were at KPJ Hospital in Seremban as my other half has an MRI appointment in the afternoon. The week before, she was also here to take some blood tests. The MRI was done on her left ear and the brain. Alhamdulillah, there were no signs of tumor; only for some signs of bacterial infection. She wanted to do this early to eliminate any sinister cause for her rare loss of low frequency hearing. With this MRI result, she can return back to the specialist at HTJ for possible diagnosis and perhaps treatment (which includes surgery).

Yesterday (Wednesday) was the birthday of my youngest son. Instead of going out for a special meal, he requested just to order some food from Bask Bear and we did so for lunch. Later in the late afternoon, I decided to buy a cake for him. 

It's not much; perhaps I can do better when things get financially better.

Mid-February Varia

Been mainly indoors for the past week or so, partly to minimise expenses. Perhaps some might think that we are rich. We are definitely not and neither that we are poor (and I'm not complaining). We don't have a lavish lifestyle; our holiday in Thailand is perhaps an exception of a luxury outing. As I see it, I consider agreeing to a conference invitation as a duty (no matter how silly it sounds) and I also realised it might be the last conference that I will go to. Thus, I took the opportunity to make it as a working holiday (the holiday is mainly for the family).

We do what we can in order to pay all our bills. If we have extras, we certainly help others in need. When we don't have as such, we cut expenses (including helping others, sorry) and we certainly do not want to burden others to assist us instead. In any case, I will have a hierarchy of priorities of where to spend whatever income I have, with the immediate family comes first (over one own self).We do extra work for extra income. Even my youngest is working part time in a shopping mall and his last day is tomorrow (an extra day on the request of his employer). He will be preparing for his BSc degree (I hope he gets somewhere close). In the last post, I told that even my other half has started working. Last Saturday, she took up a duty at a clinic in Port Dickson as they needed a doctor during the afternoon and evening. Due to the longer hours she will be in the clinic, we decided to send her there and thereafter picked her up at night after the clinic closes. On sending and picking her up, we realised that there is less traffic going to Port Dickson in the weekend, unlike the weekends before the pandemic. I guess after the pandemic, people are still struggling to recover economically. In addition to this, my other half has also observed that many clinics she knew (even the new ones) have closed down as they struggled to survive with the soaring prices of medicine. Tomorrow, she will continue to work at the same clinic for the whole day. This is despite her hearing problem in the left ear, having echoing sounds. Today, when she met the specialist at HTJ, she was told to do an MRI examination to check if there is a tumor in the middle ear (acoustic neuroma). The public hospital MRI appointment is due to be in September this year, which is too long for her to wait. Thus, we decided to make an appointment with a specialist she knew in KPJ hospital this coming Tuesday, in order to have her MRI sooner.

As for myself, I don't have any teaching job now and I will just wait for any opportunity coming my way. However, these days I have begun to take a more realistic (pessimist?) view that people would rarely want to hire an old academic. I certainly do not want to work where I am not really needed/wanted. Being at home now, I spend most of my time reading and taking notes instead, for my own scientific understanding and enrichment (which is what I thought I should be doing on retirement).

I also think that I should write more now, sharing everything that I know and hopefully the things I write and share will pass as good deeds to bring to the hereafter. I have started to update my Malay blog Acu Frekuensi. I intend to update my other two technical blogs later, after I have read enough to form coherent thoughts on the subject matter - this will of course take more time. I will make the announcement of the posts through this blog. If the post has some further importance for others, I will make the announcement in FB but I'm trying to avoid as much social media at the moment. I prefer to write only when I have something 'real' to say; I do not want to fall into the trap of needing to create something 'artificial' just for the sake of making new content (like what some would do). I hope to stay true to this.

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).